From novels to autobiographies, modern literary narrative is preoccupied with privacy, property, and personhood. So, it turns out, is law. Focusing on these and other key concepts, this course explores how law can help us to analyze literature. Drawing on legal history and political philosophy, we will consider how law provides a theoretical approach to literary criticism. In the first half of the course, we will develop our legal critical vocabulary by focusing on a series of interrelated terms: privacy, police, property, and person. We will then revisit classic works of nineteenth-century American literature to see how law provides a fresh critical perspective on canonical texts by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs.