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2 Law, Culture & Human. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/lculh2 and id is 1 raw text is: Law, Culture and the Humanities 2006; 2: 1 EDITORIAL This issue marks the beginning of our second volume, something of a mile- stone for a newjournal, a small milestone, but a significant one. Responses to volume I have been gratifying and encouraging. Moreover, interest in LCH continues to be substantial; we have a backlog of articles awaiting publication and a steady flow of articles in various stages of our review process. In future issues of volume 2 we will be publishing commentary sections on psychoanalysis and law and on torture. In this issue we take up The Language of Law. The contributions to this section take up one of the basic rudiments of legal life, but also one of its most complex components. Law, as David Mellinkoff notes, is a profession of words.' Once uttered, this description of law seems quite familiar. It conjures up comfortable images of obscure legal jargon and Dickensonian evocations of law's sometimes absurd preoccupation with form over substance. At the same time, however, it reminds us that law can never escape the intricacies and imprecisions as well as the promise and power of language itself Talking about law as a profession of words would seem, at first glance, to stand in stark contrast to the view that law is a profession of power, the command of the sovereign backed by sanction, or that law is a profession of rules. Yet both of these ideas themselves depend on language, on verbal or written utterances. Commands and rules, though distinct in many different ways, each are known and knowable by the presence of certain words-e.g. 'must', 'should', 'ought to'-which purport to require particular forms of conduct. But recognizing law as a profession of words means more than noting that it characteristically directs us through language and that its use of language is calculated to be persuasive. Law is not only profuse in its verbosity; in addition, it celebrates, and dogmatically insists on, the proper and precise formulation of human desires in words. It calls on us to keep in mind the dramatic consequences that often accompany law's peculiar linguistic formulations. As Robert Cover put it, Legal interpretation plays on a field of pain and death.2 Law is, in this sense, a stage for the display of verbal skill, linguistic virtuosity and persuasive argument in which words take on a seriousness virtually unparalleled in any other domain of human experience. As the contributions to our commentary section show, talking about the language of law is more than an interesting distraction. Attending to the lan- guage of law may be a way of attending, albeit from a new and perhaps unrecognized angle, to questions ofjustice and injustice. Thus analysis of law's language is more than aesthetic self-indulgence, but rather is part and parcel of a political and ethical project whose object is the transformation of law in the name of a justice all-too-rarely spoken about in the profession of law. Austin Sarat 1. David MellinkoWll The Language of the Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. vi. 2. Violence and the Word,tide Law Journal 95 (1986), p. 1601. fr Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities 2006 10. 1 /!)// 17438721061wMed

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