Judy Garnett, Kristi Arth, Karen Sneddon, and Richard Heppner elevated our understanding of how poetry can enrich legal pedagogy. This wasn’t a typical law and literature session centered on narrative, historical context, or interpretation. Instead, it was a masterful panel exploring how engaging with poetry can enhance the legal craft—particularly in teaching form, editing, and construction.
Karen Sneddon (Mercer) opened the discussion by exploring how form and function shape the teaching of legal writing. She began with an interactive exercise, inviting the audience to create a mad-libs-style poem inspired by William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow. This activity illustrated the interplay between order and meaning, showing how each influences the other. By guiding participants to choose a subject, two adjectives, and two prepositional phrases, Sneddon demonstrated how understanding the structure and descriptive elements of language can deepen clarity and enhance comprehension in legal writing. For those curious, my poem from the exercise was:
The Tight Swim Goggles
so much depends
upon
a tight
swim goggle
sleek
in my bag
on my head.
Richard Heppner’s paper Metaphorical Jurisdiction takes on the challenge of understanding jurisdiction as seen through the lens of various metaphors used by courts to describe it. If you’ve ever tried to wrap your head around personal jurisdiction in U.S. law—especially when it comes to corporations—you know it can feel like a maze of rules, exceptions, and legal jargon. But what if the whole framework isn’t just
complicated… it’s metaphorical? That’s the big idea behind Richard Heppner’s paper, Metaphorical Jurisdiction. Heppner dives deep into the history of personal jurisdiction and argues that the way courts talk about it—using terms like “presence,” “consent,” and “contact”—isn’t just technical. It’s figurative. These aren’t literal truths; they’re metaphors that courts treat as if they’re real. Heppner blends legal theory with insights from rhetoric, poststructuralist philosophy (think Derrida), and cognitive science to show how these metaphors shape the law. Instead of seeing personal jurisdiction as a logical, fact-based system, he suggests we view it as a conceptual story built on metaphorical thinking. Courts aren’t just applying rules—they’re interpreting symbols.
Krisiti Arth’s paper Using Poetry in a Law and Literature Classroom to Teach Legal Editing, centered on the role of literature to teach revision, editing and structure of a legal writing. Highlighting the fact that good legal writing is a fusion of multiple forms of writing, Krisit showed how helping students understand what stage of the writing they were in can enhance their editing process. Those stages include the law clerk, who edits for substance; the logician who edits for organization; the artist who edits for style; and the Law Review Editor who edits for usage and mistakes. She demonstrated how she uses these stages to scope workshops for students, both to engage in exemplary works that highlight these functions, and to workshop papers in the class. Highlighting the work in what she describes as the editing funnel, she moved deftly through an example packet from W.H. Auden’s Law Like Love to show how students consider content, structure, flow and polish and formatting as nodes in the editing process.
What made this panel so exceptional was that the panelists were thinking about how to operationalize Law and Literature to engage our students. This form of creative thinking taps into unique learning styles while also pointing students to the specific genre and form that is legal analysis and writing.