Our Fleeting Moments: Legal Thought in a Confessional Key

Law and Humanities, 2008

Law and Humanities

This special section of Law and Humanities focuses on the 45th anniversary edition of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination: a book that was groundbreaking when it first appeared in 1973 (since it is generally credited as having initiated the 'law and literature' movement) and that remains a hugely important resource today. White's approach to legal scholarship and education-reading law's instruments, its rhetoric and concepts alongside, above, below and in-between literary works and criticism-opened up a new world of intellectual possibilities. Realization of these possibilities has come in the form of the growth and flourishing, not only of law and literature but also numerous other intersections of law and the humanities that owe a debt to White. This symposium brings together seven eminent scholars (and readers of The Legal Imagination) to reflect on the contribution that White's book made and continues to make to law and humanities education and scholarship.

2007

Journal of Legal Philosophy

Michigan Law Review, 1988

2013

I cannot claim to be one of the founding scholars in law and literature—for an explanation of how law and literature as a ‘movement’ arose, there are accounts of this to be found, particularly in relation to the American scene—with Benjamin Cardozo, for example, making explicit acknowledgement of writers as fundamental sources of understanding in law and implicitly of law itself. More recently, James Boyd White in the 1970’s in recognizing the link between the worlds of law and of literature both as a source of analogous narrative models and in the shared investment in critical, deconstructive processes. Later commentary has recognized law and literature as just one aspect of the larger ‘critical legal studies’ movement, claiming the political agenda of exposing the impossibility of neutrality and law as essentially political. However, I feel rather resistant to the categorizing tendency—of sourcing a ‘history’ or a ‘movement’ or even a ‘discipline’ of law and literature. For exampl...

American Journal of Legal History, 1996

Levinas Studies, 2020

Abstract:Levinas's conception of justice in Totality and Infinity is very different from the one developed in Otherwise than Being. Both are bound to the presence of the third party next to my neighbor. But whereas in the later work this presence leads to transform the responsibility of the I for the Other, to compare the neighbor and the third party for the sake of justice, hence to enter the sphere of visibility in which retributive justice is possible, it opens in the early work to a fraternity of all humans, understood as a community of language, of expression, teaching, and commandment. Here, justice is a right to speak. I argue that these conceptions of justice are not only different. The early one can also be seen as the condition of the later one. And Levinas refers explicitly to it in Otherwise than Being as a justice that passes by justice.

"[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come out in quite some time. . . . The Law is a White Dog is an innovative, highly intellectual book . . ." --Choice "Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons…. The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose...Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central...these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance." --Conor Gearty, Times Higher Education " Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries…. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law." --Law Library Journal "A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood." --American Literature From the Inside Flap "Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz "In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet "This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College