Legal counterfactuals: A method of contrastive discourse analysis

The research project deals with the deciphering of legal discourse in contemporary literature, which is counterfactually juxtaposed with the real legal discourse of the jurist. The research work aims, on the one hand, to clarify interdisciplinary connections and potential relationships between law and literature, and, on the other hand, to expand the process of counterfactual analysis to the peculiarities of juristic- literary analysis. For this purpose, the discourse will be comparatively examined in modern literature with reference to various legal areas (customary law, criminal law, asylum law, administrative law, feud law, Talmudic law). Illustrative foundational works for this study include La décision (2022) and Repenti (2017) by the French authors Karine Tuil and Claude Chossat, Unorthodox (2017) and Ohrfeige (2016) by the American author Deborah Feldman as well as Abbas Khider from Iraq, both living in Germany, Herida Duro (2019) by the German author Michael Roes, and Il Saltozoppo (2015) by the Italian author Gioacchino Criaco. Through this comparative and cross-border literary selection, the dominant focus of previous research on criminal legal material mainly criminal and courtroom proceedings, criminal cases, and criminal figures, etc. should be enriched and complemented by expanding the research to other legal areas, and, on the other hand, a repeatable process of contrastive discourse research should be tested. The goal is to develop a methodological approach that can subsequently be applied to any interdisciplinary investigations involving law and literature. This clarifying juxtaposition of legal discourse in literature with the real legal discourse is based on the method of `legal counterfactuality,` which is to be understood as a detective-inductive approach to literary texts with the aim of highlighting legally relevant clues: After an initial step of text deciphering, the corresponding real legal discourse is extracted in a second step, which is then juxtaposed with the diegetic legal discourse in a third step. Literature and law thus engage in a shared `conversation,` assessing the degree of divergence between literary fictional variation and actual legal factuality. For readers and non-lawyers, the method of `legal counterfactuality` provides a deeper insight into legal references and clues in literary texts, aiding in a better understanding of real-world law. Likewise, it opens a new perspective for the jurist regarding the literary treatment and interpretation of legal topics. This approach aims to facilitate deeper interdisciplinary understanding and research between literature and law, bridging the gap between laypeople and experts in both disciplines.