Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Cultural Background Of The Legal Imagination, James Boyd White
The Cultural Background Of The Legal Imagination, James Boyd White
Book Chapters
I want to speak in this essay about one aspect of the origins of what is often called the law and literature movement in the United States, namely, how it got going. I shall do this by explaining the aims and assumptions of my own early contribution to it in the form of The Legal Imagination (first published in 1973). What I say will thus have some of the features of autobiography, but I hope it will be plain that this story is not really about me but about the state of the culture in which modern law and literature …
The Constitution As Literature, James Boyd White
The Constitution As Literature, James Boyd White
Book Chapters
Although presumably no one would say that the Constitution offers its readers an experience that cannot be distinguished from reading a poem or a novel, there is nonetheless a sense in which it is a kind of highly imaginative literature in its own right (indeed its nature as law requires that this be so), the reading of which may be informed by our experience of other literary forms. But to say this may be controversial, and the first step toward understanding how such a claim can be made may be to ask what it is we think characterizes imaginative literature …