Abstract

In this contribution the author wants to dissociate himself from the common view that storytelling and literary imagination are opposed to abstract legal thinking by means of legal concepts and legal principles. Departing from the undeniable gap between the technicalities of the criminal law, on the one hand, and the concrete experiences, feelings and wants of victims and offenders, on the other hand, the paper tries to show that legal provisions defining a criminal wrong and abstract legal concepts like the principle of criminal legality need not be insulated from daily life experience. Through Paul Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things evidence is given for the thesis that literary imagining by its very nature can help us to get fully engaged with the deeper meaning of an abstract concept like the principle of criminal legality