Writing the Law

In this one-day course, we’ll learn how to infuse issues of justice and law into our fiction and nonfiction, without sounding like an information dump cut from Law & Order. The United States is the most litigious nation in the world, with more lawyers, laws, and legal cases than all other nations. That produces countless ways for writers to add nuance and depth to narratives with crime or legal issues. Using legal history, classic tales, and contemporary stories as a guide, we’ll explore ways to imbue our work with legal realities, terms, known injustices that marked particular time periods, and cases. Open to writers of fiction and nonfiction, writers in this course can expect to use prompts based on short excerpts from nonfiction, fiction, and a film that could create an added dimension to their work.