Professor Suzanna Geiser’s Scholarship Explores Law, Literature, and Ethics

New to Boyd Law’s faculty, Professor Suzanna Geiser brings a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective to her scholarship, exploring the many ways law and culture intersect. With a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, Professor Geiser draws on her background in literary studies to examine how literary narrative and legal discourse shape our conceptions of individual rights, professional identities, and collective justice. She also applies humanist and rhetorical theories to contemporary issues in law and legal communication. 

Her most recent publication, an essay on legal ethics and education in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, appears in British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, an anthology edited by Melissa Ganz and published by Cambridge University Press. She has also contributed several entries on eighteenth-century fiction with legal themes to the forthcoming Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660–1820, edited by April London.

Professor Geiser’s current works-in-progress include a scholarly article, tentatively titled “The Condemned Body in Pain: The Invisibility of Human Suffering in Method of Execution Jurisprudence.” Drawing on Elaine Scarry’s theory that pain resists language and thereby limits empathetic concern, Professor Geiser examines how the Supreme Court evaluates execution methods under the Eighth Amendment. Her work suggests that the Court’s current standard for determining whether a particular method of execution is cruel or unusual reveals a deeper struggle to recognize and articulate human suffering in the law. Slated for submission in February, this project bridges historical, humanist, and contemporary perspectives on pain and suffering to reveal urgent ethical questions in method-of-execution jurisprudence.

Professor Geiser’s research also explores the evolving relationship between generative AI and traditional legal rhetoric. She is currently coauthoring an article, “Rethinking the Five Canons of Rhetoric in Legal Writing for a Generative AI World,” in which she examines how generative AI is redefining the classical canon of arrangement—transforming not only how legal writers organize their arguments, but also how they learn, teach, and exercise rhetorical judgment.