On the Use of the Humanities for Legal Expertise: The New Advocate

Abstract

This paper presents a response to the question of whether there is or should be a law and humanities canon. It is Franz Kafka’s The New Advocate (Der Neue Advokat). Between the lines of this text, a brief argument has been added concerning the use of the humanities for legal expertise. While the main text – a work of fiction – narrates the story of Dr Bucephalus, the war-horse of Alexander the Great, and his becoming admitted to practice as an advocate and to study the law, the added argument contributes little by way of additional commentary or interpretation of this fiction. Instead it suggests that legal scholars, rather than treating their art and expertise as a means only to advocate for public causes, should also not neglect the studious inutility of it. The suggestion states that jurisprudence is the source of this expertise and therefore, in so far as it ensures that law may be studied out of a genuine scholarly interest in it, remains the site for a work of law and the humanities. The main text concludes that it may be better to have done what Bucephalus has done and, under a quiet lamp, to bury oneself in the lawbooks.