Reencountering texts: James Boyd White, legal reading, and bringing back the human

Abstract

James Boyd White’s work is ultimately about language, in its many forms and multifarious instantiations. Given the breadth of his writing – from Augustine,1 to George Herbert,2 to the power of speech3 and the limits of language4 – his work and its impact extends far beyond the law. As lawyers and legal scholars, however, we should pay homage to his particular contribution to legal education, which is probably the most meaningful to our field, and in many cases to us personally.5 In this paper, I therefore wish to highlight one of White’s most important contributions to legal thought—that learning the language of the law has distinct costs for us—and consider some of its implications. I argue that perhaps the greatest and most significant loss we experience in learning the language of the law is the ability to encounter text simply as a reader. Instead, lawyers learn a reading style that is utilitarian, extractive, narrow, and entirely purpose driven. It is useful in legal argument and practice to read this way, but it is limiting—so limiting, indeed, that it risks us losing touch entirely with the open, curiosity-based, humanistic reading of texts that we did before our lives in the law. I argue that White’s scholarship lets us see and diagnose this problem, and—in its creative, broad, and humanistic engagement with a variety of texts—helps us reengage with text as a reader rather than only as a lawyer. In other words, White brings the human back, and shows us how to live as lawyers who are still deeply connected to the human world we practice in, and that is shaped by our practice.