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Law and Linguistic Moves: Refugee Law and The Displaced Person’s Commission, 1948-1950
Batlan, Felice
Batlan, Felice
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Abstract
White’s Legal Imagination is a magnificent work within the law and humanities canon. It has long been hailed for its interdisciplinarity and the penetrating questions it asks law students, lawyers, and scholars about the process of writing, reading, lawyering, and the legal profession. Even with its stunning interdisciplinarity, it has been less overtly influential in the field of legal history. Yet, the Legal Imagination has much to say to the legal historian in terms of the process of writing legal history and the questions that legal historians might bring to their work, especially for those writing about the legal profession. White emphasizes how lawyers, like all of us, use language and tell stories that are always incomplete and capable of multiple meanings. Such resounding incompleteness is especially true for legal historians who are continually analyzing archival documents which convey vastly incomplete, even false, stories. Such documents are often only fragments which can be pieced together by the historian in multiple ways, forming different stories. Using such documents, legal historians then attempt to create our own always incomplete and lacking narratives that often only gesture at the “truth.” Legal historians are always trying to capture what is the unexpressed story in our primary documents. Often, it is the silences of our documents through which our stories emerge. Such stories are often illusive – a shadow or a ghost like one of those photographs of the paranormal – visible depending upon the viewer’s perspective, open to interpretation, deeply ambiguous. In fact, for the legal historian who studies the history of the legal profession – what lawyers do, how they think, how they understand themselves, the myths that they tell, and who might even be considered part of the legal profession – constructing such narratives can feel Herculean. The legal historian is searching for the type of interiority and intentionality, with which the Legal Imagination asks its readers to engage, and which lawyers seem to fight at every turn.