Like Bill Clinton, Martha Nussbaum wants you to know that she feels your pain. She wants us all to feel each other’s pain and thinks that this will lead to better social policy, better laws, and better legal judgments. That is the burden of argument, such as it is, in Poetic Justice, a reworking of lectures Nussbaum has given at various law schools, including the University of Chicago Law School, where she is now a professor of law and ethics. The ostensible subject is how our appreciation for literary art —particularly our attentive reading of novels—can enrich legal reasoning. It sounds on the face of it innocuous enough. But the underlying agenda proves to be a standard liberal argument for social redistribution; this is said to be a moral imperative, our adoption of which, she tells us, will naturally arise out of our learning to be better literary critics. The supporting arguments are, in fact, astoundingly slipshod for a thinker who has been so routinely lionized. The book is, finally, another telling instance of the sad decline of academic disciplines: Nussbaum and her university sponsors traduce at once philosophy, literary criticism, and law in the unending effort to enforce political correctness.

Both a classicist and philosopher by training, Nussbaum, who is described by a fellow professor on the book’s dust jacket as “one of our nation’s most important public intellectuals,” began her illustrious career with a well-regarded translation of a difficult text by Aristotle. She has continued