Lifting the legal veil in The case of the speluncean explorers

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to “lift the legal veil” of Lon L. Fuller’s famous legal case of The Case of the Speluncean Explorers and Peter Suber’s The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions through the application of literary theories of meaning, interpretation, writing and truth, in particular Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” to analyze the legal and jurisprudential problems in the fictional legal cases and to trace the literary qualities of law that it has consciously renounced and unconsciously forgotten. Introducing what Peter Goodrich calls “interruption of law” (Courts of Love 5) to the reading and analysis of the two legal fictions, this dissertation reveals the way that law upholds its authority and legitimacy through language, presents alternative perspectives of understanding the nature and problems of law, illustrates the relationship of “law as literature,” and discusses the utility and significance of legal fictions and stories to the understanding of law and to the illustration of the relationship between law and literature.