Front cover -- Special Issue Law and Literature Reconsidered -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Editorial board -- Chapter 1. ''E proboscis unum: Law, literature, love, and the limits of sovereignty'' -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 2. What is it like to be like that? The progress of law and literature's ''other'' project -- Introduction -- 1. The taxonomic phase: Cataloging life's characters To help our clients -- 2. The empathetic phase: experiencing others' lives, The better to help them -- 3. The exemplary phase: Re-reading Plato's Republic -- Conclusion: The Republic constituting the Republic -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Chapter 3. The law, the norm, and the novel -- 1. The uses of the Victorians -- 2. The norm, the law, and James Fitzjames Stephen -- 3. ''Mad today and sane tomorrow'': Sensation fiction and the law -- 4. A misunderstood relation -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 4. Aesthetic judgment and legal justification -- 1. Literary discourse and aesthetic judgment -- 2. Legal institutions -- 3. The rhetoric of legal justification -- 4. Conclusion: the aesthetic predicament of legal criticism -- References -- Chapter 5. Textual properties: The limit of law and literature - Towards a Gothic jurisprudence -- Mimesis - The scene of a crime -- Literature before the law -- Spectres of law and literature - 'Gothic devilism'10 -- Monster/text/pharmakon - Mary Shelley's Frankestein -- Conclusion: ''Take precisely this example'' -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 6. ''Reading as if for life'': Law and literature is more important than ever -- Hermeneutics and the legal culture -- Narrative and the law -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 7. African American literature and the law -- Notes -- References.