This seminar will examine the treatment in literary texts of the subjects of race, law and justice as part of a broader exploration of the connections between law, and culture. We will consider the ways that both literature and the law address questions of individual morality, crime, identity, racial representation, and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class and colonization. Readings will include Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Milton Murayama, Plantation Boy, Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina, and Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns. We will read short stories from Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle, Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City, James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes, Sherman Alexi, Toughest Indian in the World, William Henry Lewis, I Got Somebody in Staunton. We will also read one or two plays and watch two or three movies. A warning: the amount of weekly reading for this course may be more than most law students have come to expect from a law course. I recommend that you read at least two of the novels over the summer before fall classes begin. Additional reading will be well worth the effort – students will find the texts a bit more enjoyable that in some other courses – but students should be aware that this is a seminar and it will not work unless all are prepared for each weekly class. Students will be required to write six short (one or two page) personal reflections responding to the readings and a book review/essay (12- 20 pages) discussing a theme or themes encountered in one or two of the books.