Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism

by James Boyd White

Book Overview

White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226894959
• ISBN13: 9780226894959
• Release Date: June 1990
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

opinions as gestures in response to previous gestures

One of the founding texts in the Law and Literature movement, Justice as Translation delivers a compelling discussion--White would not, and it would be wrong to, call it an argument--of the way in which law should be practiced informed by literary and critical theory as well as contemporary post-structuralist ethics. He proposes that the ways in which legal decisions should be made is through a close reading of the relevant texts and through what he calls translation of these texts into the context at hand. Rather than appealing to either to the "intention" of the authors of the text--as he writes, "the one intent that we securely know was the intent to publish this language as effective"--or to the "plain meaning"--he suggests that such moves really serve to mask an ulterior movement to follow one prejudices without reflection, since what is most plainly true of language is that it has no "plain meaning"--he calls for an engaged attempt to work through what the language means on account of its historical and cultural context and to translate--as one must translate a poem, as a gesture in response to a previous gesture, as he puts it--that meaning into the present context.