James Boyd White

The law has traditionally been regarded as a set of rules and institutions. In this thoughtful series of essays, James Boyd White urges a fresh view of the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. Defining and elaborating his conception, he artfully bridges the fields of jurisprudence, literature, philosophy, history, and political science. The result, a new approach that may change the way we perceive the legal process, will engage not only lawyers and law students but anyone interested in the relationship between ethics, persuasion, and community. White's essays, though bound by a common perspective, are thematically varied. Each of these pieces makes eloquent and insightful reading. Taken as a whole, they establish, by triangulation, a position from which they all proceed: a view of poetry, law, and rhetoric as essentially synonymous. Only when we perceive the links between these processes, White stresses, can we begin to unite the concerns of truth, beauty, and justice in a single field of action and expression.

Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law

Heracles' Bow

H. Jefferson Powell

Neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire of force dominates

Law and Democracy in the Empire of Force

White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate expectations for critical and analytic writing. White employs his unique approach by analyzing individual cases involving the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution and demonstrates how a judge translates the facts and the legal tradition, creating a text that constructs a political and ethical community with its readers. "White has given us not just a novel answer to the traditional jurisprudential questions, but also a new way of reading and evaluating judicial opinions, and thus a new appreciation of the liberty which they continue to protect."—Robin West, Times Literary Supplement "James Boyd White should be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, solely on the strength of this book. . . . Justice as Translation is an important work of philosophy, yet it is written in a lucid, friendly style that requires no background in philosophy. It will transform the way you think about law."—Henry Cohen, Federal Bar News & Journal "White calls us to rise above the often deadening and dreary language in which we are taught to write professionally. . . . It is hard to imagine equaling the clarity of eloquence of White's challenge. The apparently effortless grace of his prose conveys complex thoughts with deceptive simplicity."—Elizabeth Mertz, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities "Justice as Translation, like White's earlier work, provides a refreshing reminder that the humanities, despite the pummelling they have recently endured, can be humane."—Kenneth L. Karst, Michigan Law Review

An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism

Justice as Translation

Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in The Edge of Meaning, exploring each through its application to great works of Western culture—Huckleberry Finn, the Odyssey, and the paintings of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents an inspiring conception of mind, language, and the essence of living.

The Edge of Meaning

"Addressing the most fundamental imaginative and intellectual activity of human life, this book presents an inspiring conception of an art of mind and language that enables us to confront the uncertainty and fluidity that are themselves the essence of human experience."--BOOK JACKET.

White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it. "A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal

The Legal Imagination

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsI: The Claims of the World on the Self, the Self on the World1: Plato's CRITO: The Authority of Law and PhilosophyII: Creating a Public World2: Shakespeare's RICHARD II: Imagining the Modern World3: Hooker's Preface to the LAWES OF ECCLESIASTICALL POLITIE: Constituting Authority in Argument4: Hale's "Considerations Touching the Amendment or Alteration of Lawes": Determining the Authority of the Past5: PLANNED PARENTHOOD v. CASEY: Legal Judgment as an Ethical and Cultural ArtIII: The Authority of the Self6: Austen's MANSFIELD PARK: Making the Self Out of--and Against--the Culture7: Dickinson's Poetry: Transforming the Authority of LanguageIV: Reconstituting Self and World: The Creation of Authority as an Act of Hope8: Mandela's Speech from the Dock and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: Giving Meaning to Life in an Unjust WorldAfterwordAdditional NotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics

Acts of Hope

"Avoiding the recriminatory rhetoric that all too often pervades cultural, political, and scholarly debates, the authors of these first-rate essays reveal the many ways in which sensitivity to religious belief, thought, and discourse enhances and, in many respects, is absolutely necessary to serious inquiry in their diverse areas of expertise." —Joseph A. Buttigieg, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, University of Notre Dame In this wide-ranging and timely volume, fourteen scholars address the important question, How should we talk about religion, whether our own or the religion of others? They confront such fundamental topics as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life; the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion; the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own; and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism. Writing from a diversity of perspectives and academic disciplines—philosophy, classics, medieval studies, history, anthropology, economics, political science, and art history, among others—the contributors illuminate issues at the heart of the most significant cultural, social, and political debates of our day. What emerges is not a univocal answer to the question posed in the title. Instead, by demonstrating how religion is talked about in the languages of very different academic disciplines, the essayists creatively address issues that no one should ignore: fundamentalism; the role of religion in American democracy; the tension between secular liberalism and religious rhetoric; monotheism versus pluralism; and the relationship between poverty and liberation theology. Collectively, their various approaches to talking about religion—differences due to background, age, nationality, religious outlook, and intellectual commitment, yet all valid—provide a general response to the question in the book's title: in intellectual and personal community.

Perspectives, Contexts, Particularities

How Should We Talk about Religion?

Quando le parole perdono il loro significato. Linguaggio, individuo, comunità

Through fresh readings of texts ranging from Homer's Iliad, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and Austen's Emma through the United States Constitution and McCulloch v. Maryland, James Boyd White examines the relationship between an individual mind and its language and culture as well as the "textual community" established between writer and audience. These striking textual analyses develop a rhetoric—a "way of reading" that can be brought to any text but that, in broader terms, becomes a way of learning that can shape the reader's life. "In this ambitious and demanding work of literary criticism, James Boyd White seeks to communicate 'a sense of reading in a new and different way.' . . . [White's] marriage of lawyerly acumen and classically trained literary sensibility—equally evident in his earlier work, The Legal Imagination—gives the best parts of When Words Lose Their Meaning a gravity and moral earnestness rare in the pages of contemporary literary criticism."—Roger Kimball, American Scholar "James Boyd White makes a state-of-the-art attempt to enrich legal theory with the insights of modern literary theory. Of its kind, it is a singular and standout achievement. . . . [White's] selections span the whole range of legal, literary, and political offerings, and his writing evidences a sustained and intimate experience with these texts. Writing with natural elegance, White manages to be insightful and inciteful. Throughout, his timely book is energized by an urgent love of literature and law and their liberating potential. His passion and sincerity are palpable."—Allan C. Hutchinson, Yale Law Journal "Undeniably a unique and significant work. . . . When Words Lose Their Meaning is a rewarding book by a distinguished legal scholar. It is a showcase for the most interesting sort of inter-disciplinary work: the kind that brings together from traditionally separate fields not so much information as ideas and approaches."—R. B. Kershner, Jr., Georgia Review

Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community

When Words Lose Their Meaning

A reflection on law as an intellectual and ethical pursuit

Essays on Law and Legal Education

From Expectation to Experience

Heracles's Bow

"A real pleasure. . . . Reading this book was like revisiting a country I thought I knew well with a guide who could show me all kinds of delights I had missed in my previous sojourns. . . . A terrific, engaging book." --Michael Schoenfeldt, author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship "This Book of Starres" is one of those all-too-rare books in which an author's love of someone's work--in this case, the seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert--leads to a journey of exploration. Herbert's poetry presents a special set of challenges: It is to the modern ear archaic, difficult in thought and structure, and entirely theological in character. Yet no poet is more deeply admired by those who know him well. "This Book of Starres" is meant to engage the reader in a process of reading by which this verse can be seen to be vivid and alive. It is the record of one person's life-changing involvement with the poetry of George Herbert; in this it is about not only how, but why we read great poetry. "It is a joy to experience Herbert's poetry in the company of James Boyd White, whose affinity for the work is always convincing and seems at times preternatural. 'This Book of Starres' is a necessary pleasure: all readers of poetry, whether expert or inexpert, will find it enriching." --Alice Fulton ". . . both a delight to read, and one of the most instructive exercises in literature and theology I have read for a long time. . . . Herbert emerges as one of the greatest, a writer to test and change the imagination, the very way in which we think about the world and that which is beyond it." --Literature and Theology James Boyd White is Hart Wright Professor of Law, Professor of English, and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan.

James Boyd White

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