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Full-Text Articles in Law
On Lawyers And Copy Editors, Jonathan I. Tietz
On Lawyers And Copy Editors, Jonathan I. Tietz
Michigan Law Review
Review of Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.
Educative Friendship - A Personal Note, Jeanne Gaakeer
Educative Friendship - A Personal Note, Jeanne Gaakeer
Michigan Law Review
In 1992, when I started my doctorate research in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature, The Legal Imagination was one of the first books I read. To European eyes, it was a most unusual book since in continental legal theory in those days, the Anglo-analytical tradition was predominant, and French deconstruction had for some time been the up-and coming stream. Fascinated as I became with Professor White's works, I decided to try to get in contact with him in order to ask him about the genesis of his ideas. So much for the dangers of the intentional fallacy Whimsatt …
Speech, Silence, And Ethical Lives In The Law, Robin West
Speech, Silence, And Ethical Lives In The Law, Robin West
Michigan Law Review
As his many appreciative readers know, James Boyd White brought his learning to bear on the relation between ethical living and ethical speaking, and particularly as it pertains to how we live and speak in law. His prodigious writing, teaching, and speaking career, as far as I can tell, was motivated by a singular, passionate belief: that the human capacity for language can and should serve as a bridge from mind to mind and spirit to spirit, so that we might cohabit the earth not only peaceably, but with the pleasures and grace of each other's company. Language, White taught, …
The Imagination Of James Boyd White, Lee C. Bollinger
The Imagination Of James Boyd White, Lee C. Bollinger
Michigan Law Review
For several decades, James Boyd White has been a unique voice in the law. It is a voice of extraordinary intellectual range, of erudition and of deep commitment to a life of self-understanding and of humane values. His point of access is language - all language, in every context. Armed y a lifetime of thought about words, he justifiably has regarded no field or discipline or communicative activity as foreign and outside his ken. Whoever reads him must feel his sense of intellectual empowerment that our world, sectioned as it is by expertise, would deny us.
A Teacher, H. Jefferson Powell
A Teacher, H. Jefferson Powell
Michigan Law Review
James Boyd White is, above all, a teacher. Of course, that is in fact an inexact statement: Jim White is many things, some of them of greater or more central human importance - husband, father, friend, person of faith. But in this essay my concern is with Jim as an academic, and in that context I believe the title teacher captures best his goals and his achievement.
Interview With James Boyd White, James Boyd White
Interview With James Boyd White, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
The occasion of the following interview was the Montesquieu Lecture at the University of Tilburg, which Professor James Boyd White delivered in February 2006. In the lecture, entitled "When Language Meets the Mind," Professor White discussed the manner of interpreting and criticizing texts, both in the law and in other fields, that he has worked out over his career. The heart of this method, as described in the lecture, is to direct attention to three sets of questions: - What is the language in which this text is written, and the culture of which it is a part? How are …
The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky
The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky
Michigan Law Review
I spend much of my time dealing with Supreme Court opinions. Usually, I download and read them the day that they are announced by the Court. I edit them for my casebook and teach them to my students. I write about them, lecture about them, and litigate about them. My focus, like I am sure most everyone's, is functional: I try to discern the holding, appraise the reasoning, ascertain the implications, and evaluate the decision's desirability. Increasingly, though, I have begun to think that this functional approach is overlooking a crucial aspect of Supreme Court decisions: their rhetoric. I use …
Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado
Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado
Michigan Law Review
Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …
Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak And Constitutional "Meaning" For The Uninitiated, Dennis W. Arrow
Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak And Constitutional "Meaning" For The Uninitiated, Dennis W. Arrow
Michigan Law Review
A parody of postmodern writing.
The Interpreters, Kenneth L. Karst
The Interpreters, Kenneth L. Karst
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism by James Boyd White
The State Of Legal Writing: Res Ipsa Loquitur, George D. Gopen
The State Of Legal Writing: Res Ipsa Loquitur, George D. Gopen
Michigan Law Review
There is a glory, it seems, in the mystery of a language that can be deciphered only by initiates of the secret society; there is a great sense of power and an even greater actuality of power in controlling a language that in turn controls the most pressing affairs of individuals and communities; and there is a monopolistic safety in being able to manipulate a language which because it was part of the creation of legal problems must be part of their solutions as well. It was true in 1921, and it is still true sixty-six years later. This essay …
Lawyer's Writing, Richard C. Wydick
Lawyer's Writing, Richard C. Wydick
Michigan Law Review
A review of How To Write Plain English: A Book for Lawyers & Consumers by Rudolf Flesch