LAW4555 · Law and literature

Overview

In this unit, you will examine how core legal skills can be sharpened through an understanding of literary techniques. Lawyers work with stories: they listen to clients, interpret competing narratives of events, and construct persuasive accounts of what happened. You will explore narrative capacities central to legal practice, including crafting persuasive accounts, listening closely to the stories others tell, recognising different perspectives, and exercising imaginative empathy in legal reasoning. These capacities are examined through literary forms such as plays, memoirs, fiction, and songs. By studying literary texts alongside legal materials, you will examine how stories operate within the law and how attention to narrative craft can strengthen legal practice

Offerings

The Handbook publishes no offerings for this unit.

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

Learning outcomes

1. Apply advanced knowledge and demonstrated understanding of issues and topics relating to law and literature.
2. Critically analyse and persuasively evaluate key concepts and issues in law and literature, contextualised within a broad range of practice, policy and theoretical perspectives.
3. Undertake research in order to analyse and synthesise complex information in response to complex issues relating to law and literature.
4. Demonstrate engaging, detailed, and persuasive communication across a range of topics law and literature.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit typically comprises of a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study applicable to a 6 credit point unit. Learning activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning, and online engagement

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.