A-N-D

The ‘and’ in Law and Literature—or Literature and Law—points to an acronym, not a conjunction. No conjunction is necessary, because the two disciplines are in fact one. The acronym, not only in English but in German, Russian, and French, speaks out this unity. Let me demonstrate. IN ENGLISH. The ‘and’ stands for ‘Almost-Never-Doubted’. This means that the long-standing claim of the one-ness of law and literature as a single, narrative discipline is so self-evident that few dare to contradict it. IN GERMAN. The interrelation is referred to as ‘Recht UND Literatur’, and the ‘und’ stands for Unser-Netter-Doppelgaenger, or ‘our lovely double’. The idea across the Rhine seems to be that LITERARECHT or RITERATUR—as some daring folks there have called it—should unite in one word the Janus-like qualities of the single field. IN RUSSIAN. Elite thinkers in Moscow, Petersburg and the provincial capitals called the academic area ‘Zakon i Literatura’. (The Russians were wise enough centuries ago to decide that a word used as often as ‘and’ should have only one letter in it, ‘i’, pronounced ‘ee’, as in ‘Postuplenie I Nakazanie’ or ‘Voina I Mir’. Dostoevski and Tolstoi, authors respectively of Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, already grasped that ‘i’ meant just what it sounded like—‘ee!’—a sound of joy emitted by the reader of ‘Literaturelaw’ or ‘Literalaw’ or ‘Lawterature’, as the linked fields should be called. IN FRENCH. Finally the French, ahh (or maybe eeee!) the French, for whom the now-outmoded phrase ‘Droit ET Littérature’ gave forth an E-T that meant, variously, ‘Extra-terrestrial’, or ‘Ex-Tra!’. Either way, the ‘and’ in French meant something so great as to be almost other-worldly. No wonder the French have taken to the study of Litteraturdroit, as it shall henceforth be known: the unified discipline is ‘extra’, meaning superlative, fabulous, epatant, chouette, chic, ET-cetera, ET-cetera, ET-cetera. So the ‘and’, and the ‘und’, and the ‘i’, and the ‘et’ meant a unity—not just a collaboration—between subjects that were always already the same. Only petty pragmatism and (2011) 5(1) Law and Humanities 279–280