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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 …
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 …
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 …