Andrews, Tarren. "Teaching law and literature across time." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/teaching-law-and-literature-across-time. [Date accessed].

Teaching law and literature across time

Teaching law not as neutral, but as narrative; not as fixed, but as contingent

Download the transcript
Tarren Andrews
Yale University

Tarren Andrew’s transtemporal teaching methodology invites students to become curious about the law and how history is shaped across time. By reading Old English law alongside Indigenous criticism and incorporating multiple kinds of media in conversation with primary sources, students begin to perceive the elasticity of the law. Through reading the law as a genre alongside other literary forms students are equipped to question static categories and imagine new possibilities.

Further learning

Recommended

Syllabus

Indigenous women and the law in the Anglophone Empire

Tarren Andrews offers insights and methods on her class about on the law as linguistic technology, the history of personhood and belonging.

Tarren Andrews
Video

Early medieval settler colonialism

The logics of settler colonialism emerged long before the colonial era. Studying these designs through law codes, chronicles, and religious texts, reveals how colonialism is an ongoing structure shaping both past and present.

Tarren Andrews
Video

The Doctrine of Discovery

A brief history of how the Doctrine of Discovery became legal precedent for the seizure of Native lands across the world.

Scott Manning Stevens