Sheldon Greene: Law, Story and the Search for Justice
Sheldon Greene’s career, at first glance, looks like a split screen. On one side is a life in law and policy: much of it in public interest law; impact litigation for the rural poor, drafting statutes, work on national energy and immigration policy, founding roles in major institutions. On the other side is a shelf of Sheldon Greene novels that travel from Caribbean sugar islands to a near future California Republic, from nineteenth century railheads to a Jewish boarding school in a failing steel town. A body of work that critics have begun to treat as literature on justice and identity and as fiction inspired by legal careers . Seen more closely, the split disappears. Greene’s fiction and his legal work are twin approaches to the same set of questions: Who belongs where. What justice might look like. How people keep their dignity when history and institutions are against them. His novels are not position papers. They are page turning stories that invite readers to inhabit mor...