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Human Dignity And The Claim Of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama And Supreme Court Decisions, James Boyd White

Articles

I am going to bring together what may seem at first to be two extremely different institutions for the creation of public meaning, namely classical Athenian tragedy and the Supreme Court opinion.1 My object is not so much to draw lines of similarity and distinction between them, as a cultural analyst might do, as to try to capture something of what I believe is centrally at work in both institutions, in fact essential to what each at its best achieves. I can frame it as a question: How is it that the best instances of each genre (for I will …