Improving Casebooks with Fiction
posted by Nate Oman
Not surprisingly, since my secured transactions professor was Elizabeth Warren, I learned Article 9 using Warren & Lopucki’s casebook. In retrospect there are things about the book that bother me. It’s hyper law-in-action approach at times made the doctrine quite a bit muddier than it needed to be, and I tend to think that the realist claim about the uselessness of legal doctrine is a fallacy. On the other hand, it did include Tom Wolfe’s foray into the drama of commercial lending in The Man in Full, a novel that, among other things, takes readers into a workout session between a well-secured bank and an imploding real estate developer. It makes me wonder about the use (or potential use) of passages from novels in casebooks.
As far as I know no one has done so yet but I think that Christopher Buckley’s novel Little Green Men merits a place in any self-respecting administrative law casebook. The book follows the downward spiral of an inside-the-beltway, Sunday morning talkshow host who is abducted by aliens and leaves the inner corridors of the Establishment to lead the unwashed masses of UFO believers in a march on Washington. The alien abductors, of course, turn out to be agents of a secret government bureaucracy called Magestic or MJ-12. The novel provides a brief institutional history of MJ-12, charting its rise from an innocent ploy to fool Stalin in the late 1940s into huge bureeaucracy pursuing a different mission. It is one of the better description of bureaucratic evolution I read:
Then, as with so many other government programs, the original plan gave way to bigger things. . . . They decided that as long as they were at it, MJ-12 could serve another, even higher purpose: keeping the taxpaying U.S. citizenry alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space, and therefore happy to fund expansion of the military-aerospace complex. A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs.
So what began a half century ago with the towing of some pie-shaped reflective disks behind a camouflaged aircraft over Washington State soon evolved into a “black” program with a yearly budget running into the tens of millions of dollars. But Americans are easily bored. The problem quickly became how do we keep them interested? After a while, mere sightings of flying saucers just weren’t enough. MJ-12 had to devise more elaborate entertainments: physical evidence, scorch marks in the grass, traumatized animals (easy enough), cars whose batteries had inexplicably gone dead while their occupants were staring google-eyed at the funny lights. When the thrill of disabled vehicles and freaked-out pets wore off, MJ-12 had no choice but to start providing glimpses of the alien darlings themselves. This was trickier. For one thing, it meant finding dwarfs with security clearances. For this reason, aliens have gotten considerably bigger over the years.
And so on. I wonder what other novels could be used (or are used) to illustrate legal issues and make casebooks even more fun and fascinating than they already are.
May 15, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (8)
Dude - May 15, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Indeed.
As an aside, same novel is being made into a film, with John Malkovich in the lead role.
Edward Swaine - May 16, 2007 at 10:20 am
William Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own is a brilliant book that contains telling and amusing illustrations fit for Torts, Property, Civil Procedure, IP . . . The caution is that it’s not terribly easy to excerpt, nor the most accessible.
anon - May 16, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I’m probably demonstrating the depths of my dorkiness with this comment, but no environmental law casebook is truly complete without excerpts from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (to my knowledge, no such casebook exists, leaving a gap in the market, I say).
Deven Desai - May 16, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I am not sure that Catch-22 directly mentions law, but its presentation of administrative systems and rules might fit your request.
Frank - May 16, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Let me just second Frolic of His Own. What’s amazing is that he actually imagines decisions on summary judgment that are both legally plausible (citing Anderson v. Liberty Lobbby!) and, simultaneously, make all the safeguards built into the process look like a farce.
(Perhaps that’s because one case arises out of a dispute over a dog trapped in a hulking sculpture, whose maker decides to use the Visual Artists Rights Act to prevent an alteration of the sculpture needed to save the dog.”)…here’s a longer explanation of the issues:
“Oscar Crease, middle-aged college instructor, savant, and playwright, is suing a Hollywood producer for pirating his play Once at Antietam, based on his grandfather’s experiences in the Civil War, and turning it into a gory blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Oscar’s suit, and a host of others – which involve a dog trapped in an outdoor sculpture, wrongful death during a river baptism, a church versus a soft drink company, and even Oscar himself after he is run over by his own car – engulf all who surround him, from his freewheeling girlfriend to his well-to-do stepsister and her ill-fated husband (a partner in the white-shoe firm of Swyne & Dour), to his draconian, nonagenarian father, Federal Judge Thomas Crease, who has just wielded the long arm of the law to expel God (and Satan) from his courtroom.”
from
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0684800527
Mike O'Shea - May 16, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Anon –
You may be onto something. When I hear or read an expression of austere environmental/ecological views, I often do think of — wasn’t her name Anne? Anyway, the hardcore “Red” (i.e., ‘leave it all desert’) Martian environmentalist from Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
I have to admit I liked her.
anon - May 17, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Dressler’s Criminal Law casebook has an excerpt from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers. The excerpt includes a homicide, with the question being whether it was murder or manslaughter (because it was arguably in the “heat of passion”).
anon - May 17, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Dressler’s Criminal Law casebook has an excerpt from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers. The excerpt includes a homicide, with the question being whether it was murder or manslaughter (because it was arguably in the “heat of passion”).
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