Law's Literature, Law's Body: The Aversion to Linguistic Ambiguity in Law and Literature

In any kind of literary analysis, the critic must grapple with linguistic ambiguity, and the law cannot help but operate in a linguistic realm as well. Neither of these claims is terribly startling, yet studies of law and literature by literature scholars in particular remain strangely resistant to both. Literature scholars working in this field surprisingly tend to assert that the law grounds the ephemeral realm of the literary, and thus that the law corrects literature's linguistic quality. This unfortunate theoretical tendency is an effect of a broader problem in literary studies: an aversion to ambiguity that has seeped from studies of the novel into studies of law and literature.