Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

The Right To Read, Lea Shaver

Lea Shaver

Reading – for education and for pleasure – may be framed as a personal indulgence, a moral virtue, or even a civic duty. What are the implications of framing reading as a human right?

Although novel, the rights-based frame finds strong support in international human rights law. The right to read need not be defended as a “new” human right. Rather, it can be located at the intersection of more familiar guarantees. Well-established rights to education, science, culture, and freedom of expression, among others, provide the necessary normative support for recognizing a universal right to read as already implicit in …

A Conversation Between Milner Ball And James Boyd White, Milner S. Ball, James Boyd White

Other Publications

The editors of the Journal invited me to review James Boyd White's Acts of Hope. In response I proposed inviting Professor White to join me in a conversation about his work. First the editors and then he accepted the proposal. Professor White and I agreed that we might call a halt to this experiment at any time because we would not subvert our friendship in the attempt to enact an instance of it in print. The editors accepted the risk that we might at last have no pages for them. - MSB

The Last Butskellite, John D. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics by James B. White

Law And Literature: 'No Manifesto', James Boyd White

Articles

With what hopes and expectations should a lawyer turn to the reading of imaginative literature? To books and articles that purport to connect that literature in some way with the law? In particular, is "law and literature" -to which this Symposium is directed-to be thought of as an academic "field" like law and psychiatry, say, or law and economics? If so, what can it purport to teach us? If not, how is it to be thought of?

The Judicial Opinion And The Poem: Ways Of Reading, Ways Of Life, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

This paper is an essay in what I want to call the poetics of the law. I begin with a largely autobiographical account of what seems to me a striking similarity in the ways in which poetry and law once were taught - and to some degree still are taught, though perhaps less comfortably so. My first object is to suggest some connections: between these two kinds of thought and expression; between the ways in which we are habituated to read texts of each sort; and between the dilemmas that confront readers and critics in each field. In doing these …