The Legal Imagination

by James Boyd White

White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it.

"A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal

Genres: Law, Legal, Philosophy

302 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1985

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Influential in its time. The overall idea is that trainee lawyers will become better advocates if they have a grounding in literature. No one doubts the premise but it will never happen.

[Cosmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

While White's text is presented like a legal casebook, its appeal is much broader. White is concerned with the possibilities enabled or foreclosed by technical language; the animating question of the work is whether or not the lawyer (or academic, or...) can have a meaningful relationship with the professional language they use. That, in turn, leads to a more fundamental question: what does it mean to have a meaningful relationship with language? To examine that question, he draws from and examines an enormous body of literature, asking the reader to engage with him, both in reading and writing (assignments). The result is a fantastically rich and thought provoking book, never dogmatic, that I, as someone who struggles with academic writing, have found enormously useful.

[Bap · Rating 3 out of 5]

It made me excited to go to law school, a cmilation of fiction and non-fiction on how the law shapes our lives. Sadly, law school had no time for imagination.