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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.