Law Commons^™

Introduction: Is Cultural Criticism Possible?, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

It is by now something of a truism that the abstract and conceptual modes of discourse that have dominated our intellectual life in the past century have led to a rather reduced and schematic view of law. Moved by the desire to talk about social institutions in a neutral and scientific way, scholars beginning at least with John Austin have sought to define law as a set of rules, promulgated by a sovereign and addressed to the behavior of subject individuals, all in an attempt to isolate legal phenomena from their context for scientific study. Rules, on this view, are …