Loading...
Forward
Constable, Marianne
Constable, Marianne
Files
Abstract
It is my honor to introduce twelve essays, themselves honoring the 50th
anniversary of James Boyd White’s momentous The Legal Imagination:
Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression.1 The weightiness
of the 1000-page, hardcopy, 45th Anniversary Edition (2018) is matched
only by the wisdom and wittiness of its author.2 In his introduction to the
September 2023 Symposium Fifty Years of the Legal Imagination: A
Symposium in Honor of James Boyd White, White explains the moments,
the questions, the tensions, and the conjunctions that in younger days led
him to his teaching of law and humanities. As both his introduction and the
essays that follow attest, his work is above all a contribution to the learning
of law. I mean that in a double sense: the “learning of law” as how one
comes to know law and also as what law knows. Over and over, White
invites us to recognize the many ways in which knowing and doing law are
matters of language, which one can always learn to do better.