| Summary: | In Poetic Justice, Nussbaum argues that literature can enhance the practice of law, and public life in general, by showing how to make room for the imaginative sympathy that allows fiction writers to enter into the lives of « distant others » and apprehend their singularity. Nathaniel Hawthorne makes a similar case when he pits in dramatic form the deficiencies of an intolerant Puritan justice whose doctrine of judgment fails to go « beyond good and evil » against what Nussbaum calls the « literary attitude, » which stresses the complexity and uniqueness of human lives. This the « storyteller » achieves by creating characters and telling their stories, entering the depths and shifting meanders of their lives through his characteristic capacity for sympathy and imagination, offering an alternative or at least complementary model of justice: literary or « poetic » justice.
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