Discovering Our Lawyer Poets

In Discovering Our Lawyer Poets, James R. Elkins tells the story of how he discovered the intersection of two realms he had previously assumed came from fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: law and poetry. And he learns, "To my surprise, delight and amazement, I find poetry of lawyers I want to spend the day reading-contemplating."

With a piqued curiosity, Elkins starts to identify, beginning with the days of the colonists, every lawyer poet in America-to date, 1291 historical figures. In the process, he begins to collect, read, and work with the poetry of contemporary lawyers. Ultimately over the course of fifteen years, Elkins would print the work of 182 lawyer poets in the Legal Studies Forum, a journal he edited, and publish major anthologies in 2004 and 2017. The author also describes taking on another quixotic endeavor-teaching a course on Lawyers, Poets & Poetry for law students. For Elkins, walking into a law school classroom to discuss the poetry of lawyers turns out to be a highlight of forty-five years of teaching.