The historical references to the research field of law and literature, focusing on law in literature, have outlined the field geographically, provided national tendencies and outlined the state of research as a starting point for the present investigation. If the attempt to develop a ‘legal method of counterfactuality’ is to succeed against this background, the relationship between law and literature must first be defined more precisely: How exactly are the two disciplines related to each other? Where do they intersect, where do they touch, where do they separate? Are there previously undiscovered points of contact that could be utilised for the development of a methodological link? Answers to these questions are herein sought on four methodological levels, the combined interface of which is intended to determine the correlation between law and literature for the purposes of the present work: interdisciplinarity means cooperation on the basis of shared paradigms, discourse provides points of reference for a common ‘speech’, hermeneutics as a method of textual analysis is familiar to both disciplines and counter factuality links fiction and non-fiction as a product of mutual reflection. Each of these four concepts is explained below, first in general terms and then specifically for the field of law in literature.