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13 Law, Culture & Human. 5 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/lculh13 and id is 1 raw text is: 








                                                             Law, Culture and the Humanities
                                                                       2017, Vol. 13(1) 5
Editorial                                                          @ The Author(s) 2016
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                                                            DOI: 10.1177/17438721 16629743
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                                                                         OSAGE

How  do we  remember, memorialize, and celebrate scholarship on which our own work
is built? The answer seems straightforward. We cite that work and in citation acknowl-
edge a debt to the past. Yet citation can be the barest form of remembrance and is by no
means  reliably celebratory. I recently organized a conference on Rhetorical Processes
and Legal Judgments,  during which  one of the participants, Bernadette Meyler, pre-
sented a wonderful paper offering a reading of the meaning of the citation of precedent
in American Supreme  Court decisions. She argued that when judges on opposite sides of
a decision cite similar cases as precedent they establish the grounds for a dialogic engage-
ment that might otherwise be lacking.
   Hearing Bernie's presentation I thought about other work that citation of precedent
does, namely to remember,  memorialize, and (sometimes) celebrate the work of those
who  have gone before. So in a law and humanities enterprise scholarly and judicial cita-
tions work in parallel, establishing for scholars the grounds for dialogue with each other
and with our intellectual ancestors. Another compelling reason why it is important for all
of us to read the footnotes!


Austin Sarat

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