In Law's Interior, Kevin M. Crotty draws on several important literary works to offer a new model of the relationship between citizens and their laws, one that emphasizes the power of law to shape citizens and to foster or discourage their autonomy. Crotty maintains that citizens are "inside" the law they are the law's interior. Literature, he finds, can be relevant to law by emphasizing the connections between law and the world around it a stance that corrects the tendency of legal theory to treat law as a separate, autonomous entity.The texts Crotty examines Aeschylus' Oresteia, St....

The City-State of the Soul: Self-Constitution in Plato's Republic explores Plato's idea that the moral life consists in the founding of one's own soul. This insight is central to the long argument of the Republic and, in particular, to the complex relation between the city and the human soul. This fruitful picture of the moral life, however, has not received the attention it deserves. As Kevin M. Crotty argues, Plato's distinctive insight is that justice is above all a creative force. Plato presents justice not as a relation amongst fully formed individuals, but rather as the quality that...