by Lori Andrews

Last weekend, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities met in Boston.  Along with panels on constitutional theory, human rights, criminal law, and same sex marriage, there were panels on novels and movies–Billy Budd, Twelve Angry Men, Notes from the Underground, even Harry Potter.

Since I was speaking at the session on "Law and Contemporary Fiction," I prepared by reading the novels written by my co-panelists Alafair Burke (Hofstra University School of Law), Kermit Roosevelt (University of Pennsylvania Law School), and Marianne Wesson (University of Colorado Law School).  They were all law professors by day, mystery writers by night.  But unlike CSI or the usual thriller, their books tried to stay true both to the law and the emotions of being a lawyer.   It struck me that their novels could be used to teach subjects as wide-ranging as First Amendment Law, Criminal Procedure, Corporate Law, and Professional Responsibility.  But their books involved more than just a clever use of a legal construct.  They'd captured the ethical challenges that lawyers face, the insane hours, and the feeling in the pit of one's stomach when a life, a business, or a principle of value is on the line. 

The substantive legal questions in the books were fascinating.  In CHILLING EFFECT, Marianne Wesson assessed whether, if it could be shown that a purported snuff film induced a viewer to murder, it would violate the First Amendment to hold the producer liable.  And who would have thought that Kermit Roosevelt's book IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW could make the securitization of receivables not only understandable but a major plot point?     

But equally important in these well-written novels were the portrayals of life as a lawyer with all its stresses and ethical quagmires.  Alafair Burke in JUDGMENT CALLS addressed the day-to-day practicalities of being a DA, where the charge a prosecutor files may be less related to the facts of the case than to which detectives she wants as investigators.  Kermit Roosevelt did a far better job than John Grisham in portraying how the practice in a big firm wears away at a person's sense of self and how the constraints of the law can prevent lawyers from doing the right thing.  

I started writing mysteries both because I loved reading them and because I wanted to bring genetics policy issues to a larger audience.  My first novel came out of my frustration with traditional means of changing policy such as litigation or legislation.  When I chaired the federal ethics advisory committee to the Human Genome Project, I went to Congress with people who lost their jobs or their insurance because, even though they were healthy, a genetic mutation put them at a higher-than-average risk of a future disease like breast cancer.  The Congressional staff actually said, "Unless you can get us a celebrity on this issue, we won't hold hearings."

So I created Dr. Alexandra Blake, a geneticist, and her best buddy, Barbara Findlay, a military lawyer, the protagonists of my mystery series.  My scholarship informs my fiction, but something unexpected has happened–my fiction began to inform my scholarship.  For my latest mystery, IMMUNITY, I did research about human experimentation involving monoclonal antibodies. When I learned that they created unique issues for human research regulation, I began an academic project on the subject. 

Fiction has also entered into my teaching.  When I taught undergraduates at Princeton–and sometimes in my Genetics and Law class at Chicago-Kent College of Law–I've asked students to do a unique midterm project.  They read a science fiction book of their choice (every student reads a different one).  They then write a paper about the technology in the book, analyzing how close we are to employing that technology in society, what problems the technology creates for individuals and society, and whether existing laws in the real world would address those problems or whether new laws and policies are necessary. 

In a world where narrow questions of criminal law dominate television, Roosevelt, Wesson and Burke create stories spanning legal domains that affect us all.