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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Old-Fashioned View Of The Nature Of Law, James Boyd White
An Old-Fashioned View Of The Nature Of Law, James Boyd White
Articles
The law is a not an abstract system or scheme of rules, as we often speak of it, but an inherently unstable structure of thought and expression. It is built upon a distinct set of dynamic and dialogic tensions, which include: tensions between ordinary language and legal language; between legal language and the specialized discourses of other fields; between language itself and the mute world that lies beneath it; between opposing lawyers; between conflicting but justifiable ways of giving meaning to the rules and principles of law; between substantive and procedural lines of thought; between law and justice; between the …
Establishing Relations Between Law And Other Forms Of Thought And Language, James Boyd White
Establishing Relations Between Law And Other Forms Of Thought And Language, James Boyd White
Articles
The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is …
How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White
How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White
Articles
I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …
Legal Knowledge, James Boyd White
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; …
The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining
The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining
Articles
Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …
The Rhythms Of Hope And Disappointment In The Language Of Judging (St. John's University School Of Law: Rededication Symposia), James Boyd White
The Rhythms Of Hope And Disappointment In The Language Of Judging (St. John's University School Of Law: Rededication Symposia), James Boyd White
Articles
I want to talk today about a certain aspect or dimension of the language of judging. From one point of view the quality I mean can be seen as a kind of idealism inherent in legal language; from another, as a kind of fundamental hypocrisy; from still another, as a simultaneously tragic and comic element in legal life.
Translation As A Mode Of Thought, James Boyd White
Translation As A Mode Of Thought, James Boyd White
Articles
I think that Clark Cunningham's article, The Lawyer as Translator, is a wonderful piece of work, full of life and interest and originality. I especially admire: his ability to make vivid to the reader the ways in which languages do truly differ, and differ beyond our efforts to bridge them-as he shows when he imagines an attempt to translate our most common professional terms into Chinese; his recoguition of the kind of force that our languages have over our minds, both as we see the world and as we tell stories about it; his sense that what we think of …
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining
Articles
Not long ago, any question of the kind "How may theology serve as a resource in understanding law?" would have been hardly conceivable among lawyers. When Lon Fuller brought out his first book in 1940, The Law in Quest of Itself, he could think of no better way of tagging his adversary the legal positivist than to note a "parallel between theoretical theology and analytical jurisprudence." Two decades later, in the name of realism, Thurman Arnold dismissed Henry Hart's non-positivist jurisprudence in harsh terms. A master of the cutting phrase, he confidently entitled his attack "Professor Hart's Theology." Two decades …
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining
Articles
The question I wish to raise is whether one must believe what one says when one makes a statement of law. The language of belief that we know, and from which moral discourse and the moral never stray far: do judges, lawyers, law participate in it? Any such question is but an aspect of a larger question, indeed issue, of what we may call the objectivity of legal language. It is raised perhaps most acutely by the broad claims now being made for artificial intelligence and in particular for the computer programming of legal advice (as a species of what …
Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White
Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White
Articles
Except for one meeting, which I will describe below, I knew Bob Cover only through his writings. This circumstance was of course a disappointment to me, for our interests were similar, and his death now makes the loss irreparable. But perhaps this is less of a limitation than would normally be the case, for as much as anyone in the law Bob was, and is, actively present in his writing, both as a person and as a mind.-But that dichotomy of person and mind gets it wrong, for what I would like to catch is a sense of fusion or …
Intellectual Integration, James Boyd White
Intellectual Integration, James Boyd White
Articles
In this paper, I want to talk about the activity of intellectual integration itself: about what it can mean to integrate-to put together in a complex whole-aspects of our culture, or of the world, that seem to us disparate or unconnected; and what it can mean in so doing to integrate-to bring together in interactive life-aspects of our own minds and beings that we normally separate or divide from each other: I want to think of integration, that is-and of its opposite, disintegration-as taking place on two planes of existence at once, the cultural and the individual. For what is …
Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White
Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White
Articles
I want to preface my remarks by saying something about the kind of talk this is going to be. As my title says, I shall speak mainly about economics and law, which I shall examine as forms of thought and life, or what I shall call cultures. With law, about which in fact I shall speak rather briefly, I am naturally familiar by training and experience. But with economics I am familiar only as an observer as a general reader who reads the newspaper, as a lawyer who has followed a little of the law and economics literature, and as …
Judicial Criticism, James Boyd White
Judicial Criticism, James Boyd White
Articles
Today I shall talk about the criticism of judicial opinions, especially of constitutional opinions. This may at first seem to have rather little to do with our larger topic, "The Constitution and Human Values," but I hope that by the end I will be seen to be talking about that subject too. In fact I hope to show that in what I call our "criticism" our "values" are defined and made actual in most important ways.
The Invisible Discourse Of The Law: Reflections On Legal Literacy And General Education, James Boyd White
The Invisible Discourse Of The Law: Reflections On Legal Literacy And General Education, James Boyd White
Articles
My subject today is "legal literacy," but to put it that way requires immediate clarification, for that phrase has a wide range of possible meanings with many of which we shall have nothing to do. At one end of its spectrum of significance, for example, "legal literacy" means full competence in legal discourse, both as reader and as writer. This kind of literacy is the object of a professional education, and it requires not only a period of formal schooling but years of practice as well. Indeed, as is also the case with other real languages, the ideal of perfect …