The (Still) Unexplored Possibilities of a Poetics of Law

Abstract

In this contribution to the symposium celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, I have accepted White’s invitation in the last chapter of his magisterial book to think about poems and judicial opinions as compatible acts of imagination and meaning making. White asks brilliant questions, and his book is full of them, each a nugget of insight and also a prod that asks the reader to think harder, think deeper, revisit her first thoughts, to perhaps change her mind, and above all, with guidance, to educate herself. In this chapter of the book, White is chiefly interested in “how the legal imagination expresses itself in the judicial opinion,” and he frames that interest around a set of provocative questions about the form of the judicial opinion, what it demands, how it tells its story, how it manages its structural tensions, its constraints and possibilities, and the complex expectations that are brought to it.