Cornered: Literature and the Law with Professor Meghan Brinson

It's no secret that many legal practitioners are also students of the literary arts. Professor Meghan Brinson, Lecturer in Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, finds compelling ways to combine her interests in both the law and literature for the benefit of her students.

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Chapters

• 0:45 Episode Introduction -- Meghan Brinson
• 2:39 What do you cover in your law and literature course for students at UIUC?
• 3:09 What was your approach to developing this course?
• 5:12 What themes explored in this course have you found particularly resonate with students?
• 21:49 Wrapping up -- Thank you, Meghan!

Transcript

00:00:01
Oh, you're an attorney?
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I have a friend who...
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I've been meaning to update my will, but I just bought a new house.
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I want to start a business…
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My brother was fired…
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Hey, my friend got divorced a while back, and
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I just don't understand how her ex-...
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You've been there.
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At a social function, meeting friends of friends.
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Word gets out that you're an attorney and suddenly your night is filled with partygoers asking you quote-unquote simple legal questions.
00:00:25
The questions are seldom in your area.
00:00:27
Some of the stuff you haven't thought about since law school.
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You're being cornered out of court.
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In the Cornered Out of Court podcast from IICLE, you'll hear from fellow attorneys about the questions they get and the responses they give to escape being cornered.
00:00:45
It's no secret that many legal practitioners are also students of the literary arts.
00:00:50
This month's guest finds compelling ways to combine her interests in both the law and literature for the benefit of her students.
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My name is Meghan Brinson.
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I'm a lecturer of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, and I work with the undergraduate legal studies program.
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We have a minor in undergraduate legal studies.
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here at the college.
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I teach law and literature to the undergraduates.
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I also teach American justice system and gender and the law.
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How I came to this job, I actually started off as a poet.
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So I have a Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University.
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It was a somewhat academic degree compared to other Master of Fine Arts degrees.
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So I became very interested in continuing to learn more about critical studies, for example.
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And so I got a master's in English studies from Georgetown University, which is a fairly critical theory heavy program.
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So I continued to use that in my teaching as well.
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After about a decade of traveling
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the world and the country as a military spouse and teaching undergraduates here and there.
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My husband and I settled in North Carolina.
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He became a law professor and I went to law school.
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He became a law professor at Campbell University and I went to law school at North Carolina School of Law.
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And we decided after some time there, about five years, to come to Illinois.
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And I was very happy to be able to get an adjunct position at the College of Law, working with undergraduates and bringing together these kind of disparate threads.
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What do you cover in your law and literature course for students at UIUC?
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I
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introduce some critical theory ideas in my law and literature class as a way of understanding literature, what it means.
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I get to share pieces of literature that I'm pretty passionate about, particularly ones from 20th century American female poets, which is my particular area of literature that I'm interested in, and the law.
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What was your approach to developing this course?
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When I constructed that class, there are two main schools of thought in law and literature, often thought of as law as literature.
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So a literary text will often be sort of inspired by a legal issue or explore a legal issue as one of its main conflicts.
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I mean, Shakespeare was sort of notorious for this, doing almost comparative law in some of his plays.
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Merchant of Venice is a great example that a lot of people have talked a good bit about.
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Another thing, a more recent idea that sometimes gets taught in law schools that I don't do it for my undergrads, is teaching them how to look at sources of law as pieces of literature.
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So bringing the kinds of literary analysis methodologies that we use in literature and how we understand meaning making to how we understand ways of reading the law.
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I try to focus for my undergrads on
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giving them pieces of law that seem relatively easy to decode, that's sort of my goal for them, is getting them to be able to access and feel comfortable with a couple of statutes.
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I give them shorter cases, things that are a little bit more accessible.
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And I imagine leaving the sort of more in-depth conversation about how we might understand law as being contingent and situationally based,
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those sort of like reading questions for higher level students.
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So we mostly look at literature as an opportunity to explore the relationship between law and culture, sort of generally, people before the law, what we imagine the law is, which a surprising amount of literature actually kind of interrogates.
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and then covering big areas of law and sort of just introducing those topics.
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What themes explored in this course have you found particularly resonate with students?
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When I put together my syllabi, and I have three and I've mixed them up, the different pieces of literature that we do every semester, I have a unit that's focused on criminal law.
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Students respond very well to criminal law texts.
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a unit that's on criminal procedure, and students tend to really be interested in criminal procedure.
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So some basics of like Fourth Amendment search and seizure, for example.
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One thing that I like to use there is Jay-Z's 99 Problems.
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So using lyrics seems to go over pretty well in that conversation a bunch of my students have.
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a lot of experience with lyrically driven musical texts.
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And so they're very interested in connecting those lyrically driven musical texts to the encounters of the criminal justice system that they speak about and often critique.
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And then we do a section on constitutional law.
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And I would say for the past couple years, the students have been maybe most engaged in constitutional law.
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So
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We do a brief intro to the Bill of Rights, and then we sort of delve into the 14th Amendment.
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I like to do a narrative life of Frederick Douglass when we do the 14th Amendment.
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I've also in the past taught a novel that sort of dramatizes or investigates the experience of a family going through the Japanese incarceration that we talk about Korematsu.
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There are some poems that also reflect on that experience and reparations of that experience that were passed in the 90s, I believe.
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And students are very interested in that.
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So in the past year or two, I've also developed a brief week module on immigration.
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So I try to do criminal law, torts, constitutional law,
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And then something very timely.
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So it kind of ripped from the headlines type thing.
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So this semester, I gave a short novel from the early aughts called Feed, which is about this futuristic dystopian young adult novel, very popular.
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And it's about a society where people have brain chips and they're getting direct marketing, right, from corporations, raised a lot of questions about law, technology, ethics,
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AI and surveillance.
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It's a lot of mass surveillance by corporations.
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So that interaction between corporate surveillance, privacy concerns, Fourth Amendment were pretty interesting to the students and I think spoke to our sort of current questions.
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whether or not anybody wanted to get a brain chip at the end of reading that novel was something that I was really curious to see.
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Not to ruin it, does happen like pretty early on in the novel, but somebody gets hacked.
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So like the hackability of cybernetics, right, is something, or lack of support for cybernetics is something that we talked about in that context.
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And I thought that went over pretty well.
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Another thing that I've done in the past is
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talked about some kind of classic pieces of literature.
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I try to do something free every semester, something that students might have to pay for, but also something that's public domain.
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And one of those public domain pieces, Charlotte Perkin Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper, which is a late 1880s short story about a woman who is receiving a postpartum treatment.
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called Rest Cure at the direction of her husband, who's a physician, and basically is moved into a attic garret room with ugly wallpaper and bad furniture.
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And she complains about that in this sort of creepy
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country estate, which seems at first like it's going to be just a lovely sort of break from the city, but she doesn't really get to enjoy it.
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She can only see it out the windows while she's complaining about this ugly wallpaper and her sort of frustration at being watched by her domestic help, employees, and being told that she's not allowed to write, right?
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So she cannot write, she cannot really see
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her child.
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And this idea was that her postpartum psychosis or postpartum depression was caused by an excitement of the nerves and that if she thought less and ate a bunch of milk and just relaxed, that she would recover.
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Instead, she begins to hallucinate.
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I think we're led to believe that the short story, the novella, leads us to think that she's hallucinating.
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and kind of it shows her descent into madness.
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So you see a sort of overbearing but probably well-meaning husband delivering a treatment which was a cutting edge treatment at the time, a very progressive treatment, and it having a very unfortunate effect.
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And the language that Perkins uses, I'm sorry, that Gilman uses as she describes the treatment is very pointed.
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You have very little doubt by the end of the novella that the author of the text with the language that she uses blames the treatment and particularly the husband's sort of overbearing control of his spouse on her inability to
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to continue to tolerate the conditions of her solitary confinement, which I think doesn't surprise anybody in the 21st century, where we understand now solitary confinement as being a type of torture, as being something that leads sort of inexorably to these kinds of negative mental health outcomes.
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And that's something that we
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Sometimes I'm interested in relating that to Eighth Amendment, cruel and unusual punishment for how people who are incarcerated are treated.
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But of course, she's not incarcerated in this text, right?
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She's being treated in her home by a physician, even though that location is described as being very carceral.
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So there are bars on the windows and she has somebody watching her.
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So coming from a critical background, you know, very much thinking about Foucault, other kinds of social
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critics who talk about surveillance and incarceration.
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But in the context of this class, we don't get as much into things like Foucault.
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It's sort of an introductory class.
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But I did want to bring up some historical cases that were related to this.
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So some people working
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with Gilman's piece, were interested in figuring out what had inspired her.
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A lot of people wrote about this rest cure that was developed in the late 19th century.
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The physician that pioneered that actually responded to letters from Gilman herself saying, you know, that wasn't really a good experience for me and actually was able to listen to that feedback and change some elements of his treatment.
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But Gilman was inspired, according to some research, by a report that she read of an Illinois case, actually, a historical habeas corpus case from here in Illinois from the mid-part of the 19th century, so an 1860s case, where a woman who later became a big champion for mental health reform and for women's rights, Elizabeth Ware-Packard,
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was not having a good experience in her marriage.
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She was married relatively young to a much older person who was picked out for her by her family.
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She's a very religious family and was a very religious person herself.
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She had gone to a women's seminary and had
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some sort of brief, it's described, I think, as some kind of mental breakdown after she came out of seminary.
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And I think her parents were motivated by some idea that if she was in a very traditional marriage, that would be very good for her and her mental health.
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So she moved out west to Illinois with her husband and had a number of children.
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And it sounds like was not particularly happy in her marriage from the
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statements in the testimony that came out at her trial.
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She found her husband to be overbearing, a little controlling of the money, and she felt overworked and underappreciated and complained of this when he began to suspect, and it seems like she was also very active in the church and was maybe a little bit not religiously on the same page as her husband.
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So he began to suspect that there was something wrong in the marriage.
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and actually had somebody pose as a salesman of sewing machines and kind of like poke around and try to get her to talk about how she felt about her husband.
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She sort of unleashed a little bit of her dissatisfaction with her marriage.
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And that was used as
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as an excuse to say that she was actually insane.
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So he was upset that she was upset, upset that she was writing a bunch of religious tracts that he didn't agree with, and had her committed to an institution about 100 miles up the road from us here in Illinois, and did that with the help of a physician
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who signed off that she was insane, right?
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So she, at that time, it wasn't necessary for her to have any kind of a hearing.
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A husband was able to put his wife in an institution without any sort of a hearing.
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And he held her there for, I believe, about a couple of years before she was able to convince the people who were in charge of the
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mental institution that she didn't belong there.
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She wrote very persuasive.
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She was a beautiful writer.
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She wrote very persuasive letters and had a lot of support from various members of the community that she was from.
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And so she was moved back home.
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The mental institution wasn't willing to let her go on her own.
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They put her back into the custody of her husband.
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And he took her home and restrained her in the attic.
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So this is the
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the real life case, the rip from the headlines case that inspired Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story.
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She was confined in the attic for I think about a year before she was able to smuggle some letters out to some people in the community in Kankakee who were interested in helping her.
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It was local businessmen and her friends who were their wives who went to a judge in Kankakee and had it
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convinced him to have a hearing for her, which arguably she wasn't really entitled to under the laws of the time, which is sort of a surprise to people.
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But he had one anyway.
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And after a really public trial resulted in a lot of newspaper headlines, she was declared to be sane.
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A jury found that she was sane that having a difference of
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religious opinion with one's spouse doesn't make one insane that her religious opinions weren't that wild and that being unhappy in your marriage isn't a cause for being declared permanently mentally incapacitated and being put in an institution.
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What this gives us an opportunity to do in my class is to talk about the laws at the time that made that possible.
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which are coverture laws.
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So the coverture laws are very interesting.
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They're interesting to my law and lit students, but they're also very interesting to my gender and law students.
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Coverture is this legal principle that women do not have a legal identity outside of their husbands.
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So they're not free to contract.
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Under some forms of coverture, earlier forms of coverture, they're not allowed to own property in their own right or to
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use that property and direct the use of it, can't use it the way that they would like to, cannot will it away.
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Obviously, they can't vote just and also can be constrained physically in a lot of different ways under the strictest forms of coverture by their spouse who's only required to provide the necessities, right, the necessities of life to them.
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And so the spouse is free to
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to direct, constrain, and correct the behavior of his wife as he deems fit, as long as he doesn't exceed a certain amount of personal violence, which was deemed acceptable, not cruel, not the basis for divorce, and provides basic necessities.
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So those were all totally okay.
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And coverture reform starts happening in part, honestly, because of Elizabeth Ware Packard.
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So some of the property issues kind of start being, women start being allowed to at least inherit property much, much earlier in the 18, mid 1800s, 1830s through 1850s.
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They start to be able to direct in some states the use of their own property.
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But in Illinois, married women's
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property, the ability to enter into contracts, the ability, another famous Illinois case, Illinois v.
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Bradwell, to work, for example, as a lawyer is what Bradwell wanted to do in the late 1880s was not something that you could legally do.
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And so Elizabeth Ware-Packard did finally get a divorce
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from her partner.
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Packard had intended to kind of drop her off in an institution in back east and sort of leave her there.
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And she managed to escape that, get a divorce, and became a campaigner for not only women's rights, trying to end sort of piecemeal, not altogether, but statute by statute, repealing parts of COVIDure, and also letting people know that mental institutions, the one that she was in was
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horrible.
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So this is before or around contemporaneous with reports from Nellie Bly, the intrepid female journalist who had herself institutionalized so she could report back on what those conditions were like.
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And so because of that, we see a lot of reform in mental health institutions in the late 19th century across the United States as well.
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So that's a really fascinating case.
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that brings up a lot of kind of historic laws that are helpful for explaining how important the 19th Amendment was, for talking about women's rights during the Civil Rights Movement, which we discuss.
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and other various like reform movements that happened in the early 20th to mid-20th centuries.
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So the effect of literature on the law is not always talked about in the law and literature context, but as an opportunity for not just to see
00:21:14
what statutes are and what the state of law is that enables the conflict in the literature.
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But how literature can inspire movements that seek to change the laws that they talk about is a major theme and element in my class.
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And I hope the one thing that students can leave with is that literature is interested in the law just for the law's sake, but it's also very interested often
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in making a point advocating for changes in the law.
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And a lot of the texts that I assign are doing just that.
00:21:49
Thank you, Meghan.
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Professor Meghan Brinson is a lecturer in law and associate director of undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois College of Law.
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00:22:06
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00:22:08
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00:22:11
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00:22:15
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00:22:27
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00:22:40
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