Law Commons^™

Mind, Metaphor, Law, Mark L. Johnson

Mercer Law Review

Change, as John Dewey observed, is a basic fact of human experience. We are temporal creatures, and the situations we find ourselves in, the situations that make up the fabric of our lives, are always evolving and developing. The omnipresence of change throughout all human experience thus creates a fundamental problem for law, namely, how can law preserve its integrity over time, while managing to address the newly emerging circumstances that continually arise throughout our history? If, following one extreme, we think of law as fixed, static, and univocal in its content, then law runs the risk of losing its …

Re-Embodying Law, Steven L. Winter

Mercer Law Review

It was fun to watch the audience of mostly first-year students during Mark Johnson's presentation. Seven weeks into their first semester of law school, this was clearly the most fun they had had so far. And it was easy to see why: law school takes place "from the neck up," so to speak. It is so relentlessly about reason abstracted from the ordinary interests, passions, and other embodied considerations of everyday (not to mention college) life. This deracination of law is ritualized metaphorically in the black robes that enshroud our judges' bodies as if to say, "See, it is all …

Against Acting 'Humanely', Michael Goldberg

Mercer Law Review

Who could possibly be against acting 'humanely'?

I, for one, am willing to be charged with such an offense, for the charge is too broad. What precisely does it mean to act 'humanely'? Name some cases of exemplary individuals acting 'humanely' to give some kind of context for the charge; furnish some case histories that depict specific human beings who stand as virtual metaphors of 'humanity at its best.' I maintain such narratives as these are indispensable if our talk of acting 'humanely' is to have any real content. They provide the various contexts within which we can see what …

Question And Answer Period Of Symposium Participants

Mercer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Is On The Outside Looking In, And What Do They See?: Metaphors Of Exclusion In Legal Education, David T. Ritchie

Mercer Law Review

Many people might assume that metaphors are linguistic devices that pithily play on associations between unrelated kinds of things. These associations, many might further assume, show how deft an author can be at using a turn of phrase or how agile a speaker might be using widely known imagery to illustrate a point. Such assumptions are not completely arbitrary, as metaphors do indeed have important literary aspects. This device, though, is often presumed to be a mere literary or rhetorical trope designed to enliven one's language or show intellectual dexterity in discourse. Metaphor is, in this view, a mere trick …