Law Commons^™

The Invisible Discourse Of The Law: Reflections On Legal Literacy And General Education, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Almost everyone who is not trained in the law has struggled to understand legal documents, such as contracts and guarantees - not because they read poorly but because they lack legal knowledge and experience with legal language. Readers can experience the same difficulty in other fields such as philosophy, literary theory, or economics; it takes time to gain the knowledge required to become an expert reader in these areas. However, between the extremes of the trained legal expert and the complete novice is "another possible meaning of legal literacy: the degree of competence in legal discourse that is required for …