Law Commons^™

Legal Knowledge, James Boyd White

Articles

What do we know when we know the law? I asked a rabbi I know how he would answer that question with respect to Jewish law. Does someone know the law when he can repeat the rules that tell him what to do? Or when he can engage in the activity of reading them, sepa­rately or in conjunction with each other, and applying them sensibly to new circumstances? Is even that enough? My friend said it was not: he must know who he is in relation to the law, both as an individual and as a member of a people; …

Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny

Michigan Law Review

In 1956, Morocco inaugurated a constitutional democratic polity on the Western model. Elections were to be held, and political parties formed, with voters to be registered by party. The Berbers, however, did not join the parties as individual voters. Each Berber clan joined their chosen party as a unit. To consecrate (or, perhaps, to accomplish) the clan's choice, a bullock was sacrificed. These sacrificial rites offer a useful parable about the relationship between law and culture. The social order imposed by law depends crucially on the "culture" of the participants in the system - their habits, dispositions, views of the …

Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …

Plato's 'Crito': The Authority Of Law And Philosophy (Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities), James Boyd White

Articles

My talk today will consist primarily of the interpretation of one of the dialogues of Plato, called the Crito. It will not have very much about law in it, and you may well wonder why such a lecture is being given in a law school. Let me begin by saying a word or two in response to that sensible question, as a way of framing the reading that follows.

Imagining The Law, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

My aim in this paper is to trace out a certain line of thought about what it might mean to think of law rhetorically. In doing this I shall be resisting the impulse, quite common in our culture, to see the law from the outside, as a kind of intellectual and social bureaucracy; rather I am interested in seeing it from the inside, as it appears to one who is practicing or teaching it. Throughout I shall conceive of the law as a system of discourse that the lawyer and judge must learn and use, and of which we can …

"Aliens Are Coming! Drain The Pool", John D. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies by Stanley Fish. And Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation by Richard A. Posner

The Rhetoric Of The Anti-Progressive Income Tax Movement: A Typical Male Reaction, Marjorie E. Kornhauser

Michigan Law Review

This article examines the arguments against progressivity and the supporting philosophic premises behind the mask of rhetoric. It neither treats exhaustively nor demolishes the legitimacy of the arguments or the underlying philosophy. Part I briefly summarizes the major arguments against progressivity. Part II examines the economic argument, its underlying assumptions, and its limitations. Part III examines the neoconservative philosophy which underlies the justification for a flat tax and contrasts it with an alternative feminist vision of people and society, which provides strong justification for progressive taxation.

Part IV concludes that there is a strong case for progressive taxation based not …

Law And Rhetoric, Richard H. Weisberg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law by James Boyd White

Law As Rhetoric, Rhetoric As Law: The Arts Of Cultural And Communal Life, James Boyd White

Articles

In this paper I shall suggest that law is most usefully seen not, as it usually is by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric; and that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate subject. I do not mean …

The Ethics Of Argument: Plato's Gorgias And The Modern Lawyer, James Boyd White

Articles

In what follows I shall analyze Plato's text and do my best to suggest a response to it. But I should say at the outset that for the modern lawyer and law teacher this is not merely an academic exercise, for we in fact are rhetoricians very much as Plato defines them. What is at stake for us in reading this dialogue is what it means to have devoted ourselves to the set of social and intellectual practices that define the profession of law. We have a special relation to this text, for we can in the full Platonic sense …