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60 Tex. L. Rev. 415 (1981-1982)
Law as Language: Reading Law and Reading Literature

handle is hein.journals/tlr60 and id is 437 raw text is: Law as Language: Reading Law and Reading Literature James Boyd White* The lawyer and the literary critic, as readers of texts, face difficul- ties and enjoy opportunities that are far more alike than may seem at first to be the case: in a deep sense, I believe, they are the same. The lawyer must read the statutes, cases, and other documents that it is his task to understand, to interpret, and to make real in the world. This is essential to his work. Of course, he is not only a reader but a writer as well; his kind of reading completes itself only in the process of speech and writing by which he argues for one result or another, shapes his client's legal arrangements to avoid a particular hazard, or other- wise acts verbally in the world. His reading is by nature a communal activity, and he must be always alert to the readings that may be pro- posed by others. Indeed, as we shall see, reading a legal text is often not so much reading for a single meaning as reading for a range of possible meanings. Law is in a full sense a language, for it is a way of reading and writing and speaking and, in doing these things, it is a way of maintaining a culture, largely a culture of argument, which has a character of its own. This is all rather like some current views of reading literature. Lit- erary critics have come to focus on the fact that reading literature (like reading law) is not merely a process of observing and receiving, but an activity of the mind and imagination, a process that requires constant judgment and creation. Like law, literature is inherently communal: one learns to read a particular text in part from other readers, and one helps others to read it. In this shared process readers maintain what might be called a culture of reading, a set of understandings and con- ceptions by which the process can go on. This is an interpretative cul- ture rather like the culture of argument established by lawyers. The basic idea of those critics who place great emphasis on the creative and * Professor in the Law School, the College, and the Committee on the Ancient Mediterra- nean World, The University of Chicago. A.B. 1960, Amherst College; A.M. 1961, LL.B. 1964, Harvard University. I am grateful for the helpful comments of L.H. LaRue, Geoffrey Stone, and Cass Sunstein on an earlier draft of this paper, part of which are drawn from my book, WHEN WoRDs LOSE THEIR MEANING: CONSTITUTIONS AND RECONSTITUTIONS OF LANGUAGE, CHAR- ACTER, AND COMMUNITY, to be published by The University of Chicago Press in 1983. 415

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