Cognitive Legal Humanities is a growing interdisciplinary field drawing on research across a spectrum of cognitive sciences (i.e., cognitive psychology, cognitive ethnography, philosophy of mind, and social neuroscience) and the humanities (i.e., law, history, and philosophy). The proposed special session provides a forum for literary scholars who contribute to this new field by developing theoretical models for investigating the role of cognition in literary and cinematic representations of legal practices. All four participants have extensive backgrounds in cognitive literary theory as well as in law and literature (see, for instance, Lee’s A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination; Zunshine’s Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England; Spolsky’s Contracts of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community; and Stern’s The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities). The panel is conceived as comparativist and historicist: the presenters use as their case studies works of literature from ancient Greece, Renaissance England, nineteenth-century France, and modern China, as well as North-American movies about revenge, and courtroom dramas; and they emphasize historically-specific “ideologies of mind” that underwrite the functioning of legal systems in different cultures.

While the speakers draw on a wide spectrum of paradigms from cognitive sciences—ranging from studies in metacognition and perspective taking (e.g., Marisa Przyrembel et al, “Illuminating the Dark Matter of Social Neuroscience”) and ethnographic investigations of the “opacity of mind” model (Tanya Luhrmann, “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind”), to the work on “representational hunger” (Andy Clark, Being There), predictive processing (Clark, Surfing Uncertainty), and moral emotions (Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind)—one issue that comes to the forefront of all papers is genre. Thus, Spolsky demonstrates that pastoral comedy and revenge tragedy exploit a “particular weakness in legal systems—namely how to guarantee equity, that is, equal justice, in cases that don’t fit existing law codes,” and she argues that, though “never thought of as a pair,” the two genres “are, in fact, two displays of the same legal problem: how far does the law extend and is there a place ‘outside the law?’” This problem (to adapt the term from philosophy of mind) is “hungry for representation,” which is to say that artists try again and again to set it out, to display it, in ways that might advance its resolution. It is repeated and repeated not because it is in some trivial sense ‘popular’ but because it resists clarification and remains in need of more representation.”

Similarly, Lee argues that crime genre exploits the gap that exists in the modern state of law, “between moral justice and legal justice.” Using Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and the contemporary Chinese novel, Sunspots by Xu Yigua, as the starting points for her comparative reading, she then develops a “broader reflection on how literature exploits the gap between law and morality, between malum in se (crime in itself) and malum prohibitum (regulatory crime), between free will and moral luck.” Engaging insights of cognitive literary theorists, philosophers, and social psychologists (from Margrethe Bruun Vaage and Martha Nussbaum to Jonathan Haidt), Lee shows that when “crime fiction spotlights transgressive characters and manipulates readerly empathy, it prompts us to question the givenness of social norms and legal regimes.”

Questioning the givenness of social norms and legal regimes is also the focal point of the last presentation, by Zunshine, although her perspective is informed by the work of cognitive ethnographers, such as Bambi Schieffelin and Tanya Lurhmann, who study societies that subscribe to the “opacity of mind” model of communication. The most striking feature of this model is a consistent and vocal “refusal to infer what other people are thinking unless they verbalize their intentions” (Lurhmann, 7). An awareness of this model prompts us to reconsider an array of familiar cultural practices underwritten, arguably, by its alternative, that is, by the “transparency of mind” model, according to which actively inferring other people’s thoughts and cleverly contesting their stated intentions in public constitute prosocial behavior. Drawing on nail-biting scenes of cross-examination of defendants (e.g., in Billy Wilder’s 1957 Witness for the Prosecution), Zunshine suggests that the genre of courtroom drama exploits the fundamental cognitive instability of the cultural intuition that people’s minds are knowable and must be elucidated in public in order for justice to be served.