Orchestrating encounters: teaching law at a liberal arts and sciences college in the Netherlands

Central thesis: Feed students literary imagination when studying law - go beyond the rules and into the story

The law is all about stories. Stories of individuals encountering injustices. Stories of competing interests, and finding a balance between them. Stories of legislators seeking to structurally curb lawlessness. This is why I feel that it is so important to feed the narrative imagination of students, and to stimulate them to see and to learn about the stories behind the rules, and behind the case law. My emphasis about the importance of an encounter between the law and the liberal arts in this book concerns a general plea for more interdisciplinarity, but puts a particular emphasis on the humanities. The literary imagination can be fed in many ways – through stimulating students to conduct socio-legal research, through reading Kafka, through stimulating them to write a poem about justice. Whatever the form, more attention for the story of, and behind the law would not only serve law students well but, ultimately, also their pursuit of justice.