CHANAKYA NATIONAL LAW UNVERSITY

Final Draft in the partial fulfillment of course work in LEGAL ENGLISH

JAMES BOYD WHITE ON LAW AND LITERATURE

Submitted To –Mr. Pratyush Kaushik Submitted By - Neena

Faculty Of Legal English Roll No - 1743

Course – BA.LLB

Semester – 2nd

1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank my faculty Dr. Pratyush Kaushik whose assignment of such relevant
and current topic made work towards knowing the subjects with a greater interest and
enthusiasm and moreover she guided me throughout the project .

I owe the present accomplishment of my project to my friends who held me immensely with
sources of research material throughout the project and without whom I couldn’t have
completed it in the present way.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to my parents and all those unseen hands who helped
me out at every stage of the project.

Neena

2nd Semester

Roll No – 1743

2
DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the work reported in the BA LL.B (Hons.) Project Report entitled
“James Boyd White on Law And Literature” submitted at Chanakya National Law
University, Patna is an authentic record of my work carried out under the supervision of Dr.
Pratyush Kaushik . I have not submitted this work elsewhere for any other degree or
diploma. I am fully responsible for the contents of my Project Report.

NEENA

3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

TOPIC PAGE NUMBER

1. Aims And Objectives 05

2. Research Methodology 05
3. Hypothesis 05
4. Law And Literature Movement 06
5. Law As Literature 08
6. Law In Literature 09
7. Criticism Of Law And Literature Movement 10
8. James Boyd White 13
9. The Legal Imagination 12
10. Contribution Of Jamws Boyd White 14
11. Conclusion 16

4
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

 To study about the LAW AND LITERATURE movement.

 To study about the impacts of the movement.
 To study about the contribution of other prominent leaders of the movement.
 To study about James Boyd White.
 To study about the contribution of James Boyd White.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In this project Doctrinal Method of Research is used. Doctrinal Methods refer to Library
research, research or processes done upon some texts writings or Documents, legal
propositions and Doctrines, Articles, Books as well as Online Research and Journals relating
to the subject. This project is an intensive one so this method is sufficient to address the
findings and to arrive at concrete conclusions.

HYPOTHESIS

The interdisciplinary series “Law & Literature” takes a systematic look at the correlation
between literature and the law. The studies presented in this series analyze the complex
interrelation between two cultural spheres which are not only at the basis of Western Culture
and Society, but share in a common focus on texts. Bringing together contributions by jurists,
historians of law, legal philosophers, and specialists in literary and cultural studies, this series
reflects a trend in current inter- and transdisciplinary research which has recently shown rapid
growth both in Europe and the United States.

5
LAW AND LITRATURE MOVEMENT

The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection

between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual
history of law—first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value
and meaning, or whether it must be plugged into a large cultural or philosophical or social-
science context to give it value and meaning; and, second, the growing focus on the
mutability of meaning in all texts, whether literary or legal. Those who work in the field
stress one or the other of two complementary perspectives: Law in literature (understanding
enduring issues as they are explored in great literary texts) and law as
literature (understanding legal texts by reference to methods of literary interpretation,
analysis, and critique).1

This movement has broad and potentially far reaching implications with regards to
future teaching methods, scholarship, and interpretations of legal texts. Combining literature's
ability to provide unique insight into the human condition through text with the legal
framework that regulates those human experiences in reality gives a democratic judiciary a
new and dynamic approach to reaching the aims of providing a just and moral society. It is
necessary, in practical thought and discussion about the use of legal rhetoric, to understand

text's role in defining human experience .2

Perhaps first to envision the movement were John Wigmore and Benjamin Cardozo, who
acknowledged "novelists and poets" as the principal teachers of law in the first half of the
20th century. Most scholars, however, credit James Boyd White as the founder of the law and
literature movement because of the dedicated research and distinguished publications he has
contributed to this rapidly growing field. Among his many literary books and articles, White's
most renowned publication, The Legal Imagination, is often credited with initiating the law
and literature movement. This book, first published in 1973, is a fusion of anthology and
critique, superficially resembling a traditional legal casebook but drawing on a much wider
and more diverse range of sources, with headnotes and questions emphasizing the
relationship of legal texts to literary analysis and literary texts to the legal issues that they
1
https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/129192

2
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol11/iss2/8/

6
explore.   The movement began attracting attention in the 1970s and by the 1980s had gained
substantial ground in academia. The proponents of the law-in-literature theory, such
as Richard Weisberg and Robert Weisberg, believe that literary works,
especially narratives centered on a legal conflict, will offer lawyers and judges insight into
the "nature of law" that would otherwise go missing in the traditionally strict study of legal
rhetoric.3

In its early stages, the law and literature movement focused strictly on the law in
literature theory; however, beginning in the late 1970s the law as literature perspective began
to gain popularity. This perspective seeks to enhance legal studies by examining and
interpreting legal texts using the techniques of literary critics. Scholars such as White
and Ronald Dworkin find greater relevance in law as literature because it maintains that the
meaning of legal texts, such as written law, like any other genre of literature, can only be
discovered through interpretation. Although legal scholars have long considered both literary
and legal texts in their study of the legal process, the recent degree to which the two
seemingly separate genres interact has sparked great debates among scholars.

Law and literature studies are separated into three areas. The first area involves law in literatu
re. This area focuses on thelegal themes depicted in novels and other literary works. These fic
tionalized accounts are used as a prism through whichactual proceedings in U.S. courtrooms 
are scrutinized.

The second area involves law as literature. This area studies the educational aspects of actual 
trials that involve recurringlegal disputes over issues such as race relations and the proper rol
e of law enforcement in a free society. This second areaof study also analyzes the prose and r
hetoric that judges use to explain the legal arguments and conclusions in their judicial
opinions.

The third area focuses on law and literature. It compares and contrasts the analytical tools eac
h discipline employs wheninterpreting a particular text, whether it be a constitution, a statute, 
a judicial precedent, or a work of literature.

3
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
referer=https://www.google.co.in/&httpsredir=1&article=1645&context=facpub

7
LAW IN LITERATURE

The law in literature view is specifically concerned with the way in which legal situations are
presented in literature. Generally, they place a high value on the "independent" view from
which literary writers are able to see the law. They believe that such authors have a lesson to
teach legal scholars and lawyers alike about the human condition, and the law's effect on it.
James Boyd White sees an intrinsic value in the use of literature as a means of discussing
legal topics. Unlike White however, who places value on literature for its ability to stimulate
critical thought and theory, Weisberg believes that literature should be valued for its ability to
cause one to relate to others, and for the political and social contexts that novels, particularly
those dealing with the law, grapple with. For Weisberg, this is reason enough for its
justification in the legal arena because such novels cause their students to reach conclusions
regarding human understanding. In his study Poethics, Weisberg states that, "Poethics in its
attention to legal communication and to the plight of those who are 'other', seeks to revitalize
the ethical component of the law."4

Richard Weisberg's interest in the law and literature movement might be seen as slightly
different than that of White, who places emphasis on the rhetorical techniques and abilities
that literature utilizes. Weisberg rather wishes to use literature as a way of critiquing social
institutions and legal norms. For him it is the subject matter of novels and not their rhetorical
tools that make them important in instructing law students, as well as furthering
understanding of legal matters for the independent law scholar.

4
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/practice-extended/9780231175364

8
LAW AS LITERATURE

Law as literature scholars see value in the techniques employed by literary scholars.
Generally speaking, these scholars may see legal text as a form of literature thus
making literary critique and analysis of it possible. Unlike the law in literature scholars, these
minds only see possibilities in the tools of literary theory, and not really the subject of the
great novel that law students often find themselves reading, although most might agree that
literature serves a purpose that allows for ethical development and growth within the student.

While James Boyd White acknowledges the relevance of the law-in-literature perspective, he

finds law-as-literature more tenable because of the position's ability to combine the two
seemingly disparate disciplines and allow for text to fulfill its role of defining culture and
creating relationships. According to White, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice5

is meant to teach the reader how to read his way into becoming a member of an audience it
defines-into becoming one who understands each shift of tone, who shares the perceptions
and judgments the text invites him to make, and who feels the sentiments proper to the
circumstances. Both for its characters and readers, this novel is in a sense about reading.6

James White also supports the arguments in favor of the use of literature to improve legal
understanding. In his article, Law as Interpretation, White stated, "I propose that we can
improve our understanding of law by comparing legal interpretation with interpretation in
other fields of knowledge, particularly literature." He believes that our interpretations of
literary works may help us to an improved understanding of our cultural environment, which
in turn helps us to come to a better understanding and interpretation of the law.

5
http://lexisnexis.in/law-and-literature-readings-in-english.htm

6
http://www.law.ntu.edu.tw/ntulawreview/articles/3-1/2008

9
CRITISISM OF THE LAW AND LITERATURE MOVEMENT

The law and literature movement' emerged, in part, as a response to the widely proclaimed
inadequacies of current legal education, as well as to the perceived limitations in legal
analysis. The law and literature movement is at the cutting edge of contemporary legal
thought. The presentation over the last decade of several symposia devoted solely to law and
literature, the introduction of courses on the subject at a number of law schools, and the
considerable space devoted to commentary on the subject by law reviews. One well-known
legal scholar expresses serious doubts regarding the direction the movement has taken, and
seems to advocate restricting the use of literature in the study of law in favor of a reassertion
of the already familiar economics approach to the law. To many unacquainted with the
movement, law and literature seem almost mutually exclusive enterprises. Certainly, a legal
work and a literary work are at once distinguishable. Legal scholars have not yet fully
explored or resolved the issues arising from the distinct characteristics of legal and literary
works that they face when attempting to integrate literature and literary techniques into the
pool of legal materials and tools. Exponents of the movement utilize the very qualities of
literature, such as its experiential character, that cause skeptics to challenge the wisdom of
incorporating literature into the study of law. The movement's range and dimensions shift
dynamically as the scholars dispute the relevance of legal insight which literature can
uniquely generate and literature's potential for altering established authoritative frameworks
for legal interpretation. The diversity of viewpoints on the role of literature in the practice and
study of law attests to the richness of literature as a source for legal discussion.7

7
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Law+and+Literature

10
JAMES BOYD WHITE

James Boyd White (born 1938) is an American law professor, literary critic, scholar and
philosopher who is generally credited with founding the "Law and Literature" movement and
is the preeminent proponent of the analysis of constitutive rhetoric in the analysis of legal
texts. He is a graduate of Amherst College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Graduate
School, where he obtained an MA in English. After graduation from law school, he spent a
year as a Sheldon Fellow in Europe and then practiced law in Boston for two years. He began
his teaching career at the University of Colorado Law School and moved in the mid-1970s to
the University of Chicago, where he was a professor in the Law School, the College, and the
Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World. He served as a governor of the Chicago
Council of Lawyers and is a member of the American Law Institute and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1997-98 was a Phi Beta
Kappa Visiting Scholar. At Michigan, he is a professor of English emeritus and the L. Hart
Wright Collegiate Professor of Law Emeritus. He is also a former chair of the Michigan
Society of Fellows. He has published numerous books: The Legal
Imagination(1973), Constitutional Criminal Procedure (with James Scarboro, 1976), When
Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and
Community (1984), Heracles' Bow: Essays in the Rhetoric and Poetics of the
Law (1985), Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (1990), "This
Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert (1994), Acts of Hope: The Creation of
Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (1994). From Expectation to Experience: Essays on
Law and Legal Education (2000), The Edge of Meaning (2001); and in 2006, both Living
Speech: Resisting the Empire of Forceand an edited volume, How Should We Talk About
Religion? 

11
THE LEGAL IMAGINATION ; STUDIES IN THE NATURE
OF LEGAL THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

In The Legal Imagination Professor James White probes the language of law. With that
gentle skill born only of great charity, he also leads the readers to face the possibilities for life
and death that law offers.. Rather we shall undertake a reflective response to it, with special
reference to the nature of legal education and the linkage of law, language, death, and life.

The introduction to this book describes it as the text for a kind of "advanced course in reading
and writing,"a characterization which becomes revealing when Professor White explains that,
in his view, "'reading and writing' [can] be said to cover the whole of one's
education."Although I am not sure that the book is generally suitable as the text for a law
school course, the author also hopes "that one can be interested simply in reading it through."
One can indeed. As a book which stands independently it is a singular contribution-the script
for perfected legal education. The book contains six chapters, bearing such unassuming titles
as "The Lawyer as Writer" and "Judgment and Explanation: The Legal Mind at Work."' Each
chapter is divided into groups of selected readings, commentary (at times extensive), and
questions, which lead to writing assignments (twenty-one in all, plus alternatives). The
readings, which precede and color the assignments and constitute the bulk of the volume,
come from the author's notablefamiliarity with literature and the classics as well as law. They
include, in addition to case opinions and statutes, poems, excerpts from novels, plays, and
histories, and even a bit of Episcopal liturgy.The book's range of selections is certainly
unusual for a casebook. Its organizing principle is more than unusual; it is a whollyfresh
departure: Professor White involves the reader in a companionable,systematic venture of the
mind, the ultimate goal of which is to foster responsible, imaginative lives in the practice of
law.Toward this end, White defines and animates the so-called legal imagination by
comparing it with other kinds of imagination.8This sort of comparison might seem alien to
legal thinking. The supposed incapacity of the legal mind for such extra-legal comparison
was fixed in a notorious dictum of Thomas Reed Powell, who alleged that when "you can
think about something which is attached to something else without thinking about what it is
attached to, then you have what is called a legal mind." It is not that lawyers have been
8
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Law+and+Literature

12
thought incapable of making any connections at all: connections, even creative ones, are of
course the coinage of the common law. It is rather that the range of connections has appeared
circumscribed within a discrete, closed universe of discourse, the world of stare decisis. Other
worlds intrude only to be transmuted into the terms of the legal one; outside connections are
processed into a cash-and-case nexus.

The lawyer translates the human body from the world of nature into the world of courts just
as Linda Lovelace translates it into the world of pornography: the body is made to seem
incredible but is actually divested of mystery; it is seemingly opened to illimitable
possibilities but is in fact reduced to an object denuded of wonder. The body loses the
referents of a human world, to be analyzed into cases. Such is the paradigmatic fate of things
and acts brought within the processes of law. It is therefore singular that Professor White
stimulates the reader to discover comparisons to worlds outside of law. His purpose is not to
grind those other worlds through the wheels of law but to define the law by looking at it from
the outside. The law thus defined can be controlled; one can invest the law, and one's life
within it, with more deliberate, more creative responsibility. As he observes: "For some
people, law leads to an ever duller and more restricting life, to drudgery and routine; for
others, to a life by comparison free and self-expressive, which seems to yield and form itself
to the controlling intelligence or imagination."" Professor White would have law render us a
life of choice. We have been reaching for a book like this, moving toward it by degrees for as
long as we have reckoned with the truth that law is neither self-enclosed nor self-sufficient.
Thus casebooks have dressed their cases with ever more generous dollops of economic theory
and even theology.'2 Law schools have been developing courses like "Law and Literature"
and "Law and Psychiatry"; the Harvard Law School together with the National Endowment
for the Humanities has experimented with a program in law and the humanities. But The
Legal Imagination is qualitatively different from such uncertain alliances. There is a lot of
literature in this book, but it is not simply a law-and-literature book; it is rather a book about
law as literature. There is a lot of imagination in this book, but it is not simply a book about
law and the imagination; it is rather a book of the legal imagination.9

9
http://www.fountainmagazine.com/Issue/detail/The-Relationship-between-Law-and-the-Benefits-of-
Intermingling-Them

13
CONTRIBUTION OF JAMES BOYD WHITE

In The Legal Imagination,  White focuses on traditional subjects—reading and writing—but

finds that he must create "a new subject", "a study of what lawyers and judges do with
words.". White sets out to explore how lawyers and judges "traditionally conceive of and talk
about experience" and how these "modes of thought and expression can be mastered—and
perhaps modified—by an individual mind."White's conception of this "new subject" of
reading and writing, properly conceived, "cover the whole of one's education.". White insists
that, "To ask how to read and write well is to ask practically everything, one might say, and
indeed a legal education could be defined by saying that one learns to read and write the
professional language of the law, to master a set of special ways of thinking and talking."

White considers, in passing, the possibility that he is working in the field of jurisprudence but
explicitly avoids this characterization of his project. White may be doing what we would
today call "narrative jurisprudence," but in the early 1970s, he saw his work as an inquiry into
the nature of the legal mind and imagination.White's genius, in my view, lies in the way he
juxtaposes the mundane—reading and writing–with the more exotic sounding—"legal
imagination." For White, in this early work, and throughout his prolific writings, we are
asked to consider law as an "activity of the imagination" and the writing of judges and
lawyers "as a literature of the imagination."

White begins with a set of diagnostic questions:

(1) What does it mean to give yourself such an education, to learn to think and speak like a
lawyer? You will see that the question so stated has two obvious branches: how do you do it,
in what does the lawyer's art consist? And what does it signify to have mastered that art—
what have you gained, what lost?"

(2) "What are the consequences of learning to function" in the way that lawyers do?

(3) "What does it mean to learn to think and speak like a lawyer?"

In response to these questions, White proposes a series of writing activities in which "the
student is asked to write as lawyer, judge, and legislator, and to reflect as a mind and a person

14
on what he has done, to speak in his own voice about his experience of writing and thinking.
He is asked to see what the lawyer does as a literary activity, as an enterprise of the
imagination, with respect to which both success and failure—if he can define them—are
possibilities for him."

This way of writing allows the student to compare the literature of law with other forms of
literature. By attending to the way we read and write as lawyers, we see better how the
lawyer ethic works and how it fails. White argues that "one is responsible for what one does
and writes" and goes on to note that the possibilities of success and failure must be defined by
the student of law and "[h]e must judge for himself what these possibilities are."

We judge possibilities of success and failure by looking both inside and outside the
profession. White steers clear of the hermetic world of traditional approaches to legal writing.
He seeks to "establish a way of looking at the law from the outside, a way of comparing it
with other forms of literary and intellectual activity . . . .". We learn what law leaves out,
what is missing from legal writing and legal education by turning to other forms of literature.
Indeed, it is this comparative turn, the move outside law, that is "meant to give us a common
sense of what legal literature leaves out, of what others do that the law does not . . . ."

There is a "genuine difficulty" associated with using language the way lawyers attempt to use
it.. "At every stage, the lawyer speaks to experience and in doing so defines anew the limits
and capacities of his own imagination, defines himself as a person and a mind."

For White, the goal of legal education is not turning out a skilled technician but rather a
"lawyer writer" with an "independent intelligence and imagination." A lawyer who takes
writing—any form of writing—seriously must develop an intelligence and imagination that
draw on literature and modes of thought (what White calls "literary and intellectual activity")
that exist beyond law.10

10
http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/writeshop/writeshop/jbwhite.html

15
CONCLUSION

The field of law and literature is not new. Nineteenth-century English lawyers wrote about
depictions of the legal system by Shakespeare, Dickens, and other famous writers. Wigmore
thought lawyers should read the great writers to learn about human nature." Cardozo's paper
"Law and Literature" analyzed the literary style of judicial opinions. But only since the
publication in 1973 of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination" has a distinct, self-
conscious field of law and literature emerged. Until then the field consisted of little more than
reminders that law is a surprisingly frequent subject of literature and that judicial opinions,
and to some extent other forms of legal writing, often have a literary character and quality.

The frequency with which legal subject matter appears in literature is a largely adventitious
circumstance. The literary character of judicial opinions, on the other hand, is an interesting
and significant phenomenon, though regrettably a diminishing one, as more and more
opinions are ghost written by newly graduated law students neither chosen for nor
encouraged in literary flair. The field of law and literature has grown in recent years for both
institutional and substantive reasons. The institutional reasons are the displacement of many
graduate students, and some faculty, from the humanities into law, following a decline in
academic job opportunities in the humanities that began around 1970; the growing receptivity
of academic lawyers to the insights and methods of other fields of learning; and the sheer
increase in the size of law school faculties, which has permitted faculty members to
specialize. If survival is the test of greatness in literature, we can begin to see why law figures
with some frequency as a subject of great literature.

For literature to survive it must deal with things that do not change much over time; and, like
love, ambition, and human nature generally, the law is a remarkably unchanging facet of
human social existence. Specific doctrines and procedures may change, but the broad features
of the law do not. Professor White is trying to make the legal profession feel better about
what it does, by explaining that its work has affinities with the work of the writers and critics
of great literature, but only when White is writing about literature are his words touched with
fire.

16