Lord on Law and Green Eggs and Ham @LawMcGill

Phil Lord, McGill University Faculty of Law, is publishing Law and Green Eggs and Ham in volume 6 of Anamorphosis: International Journal of Law and Literature (2020). Here is the abstract.

This paper uses Green Eggs and Ham, the fourth best-selling children’s book of all time, as a case study to argue that non-didactic children’s literature is a fundamental source of law. It frames such literature as constitutive of internal behavioral rules in the child-reader and these rules as central to guiding human behavior. It argues that the rules of behavior which can be synthesized from non-didactic literature meet all of the main characteristics of law and are more fundamental than traditional sources of law. It, finally, offers two examples of behavioral rules which can be synthesized from Green Eggs and Ham, one regarding the importance of persistence and the other regarding the importance of open-mindedness.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.