David Kenny (Trinity College Dublin; Google Scholar), Reencountering Texts: James Boyd White, Legal Reading, and Bringing Back the Human, 35 Yale J.L. & Human. __ (2024):
This paper, written in honour of James Boyd White and his magisterial work The Legal Imagination, asks what lawyers lose in the process of legal education. It suggests, drawing on White, that lawyers lose the ability to read text in any other than a legal way, and that legal reading is narrow, extractive, utilitarian, and fails to meet text on its own terms. It is the antithesis of the broad possibilities of humanistic reading of text, and pares the human away. White—through his non-didactic approach to legal education, and open-ended consideration of literary subject matter—not only helps us to see the loss we experience with legal reading, but also helps us to combat it. James Boyd White helps us to once again encounter texts as readers rather than lawyers, and to bring the human back.
Conclusion
At the end of this discussion, where does this leave us? What does it mean to embrace White’s invitation to become readers again? White is reassuring in making it clear that thinking in this way does not run contrary to closure or make legal practice impossible. White’s purpose is to try to show why a person would work in law. White thinks, rightly, that the practice of law is worthwhile and important. He does not want you to drop the law and go do something else. One of the fears that people have, I think, is that if they stop “thinking like a lawyer”—if they took White’s invitation to bring back the human—they might lose their legal skills or legal viewpoint, might be worse at the craft of the law, or no longer be able to engage fully in legal discourse. But this is not so. Once you have learnt the law’s language, you will always be able to speak it again if and when you need to. You do not, if you start to see things White’s way, lose this skill. Instead, you get be\er at swapping between different frames and modes of thought. You hold things in tension that once may have seemed mutually exclusive.
White simply wants you to engage with law in this broader way—with imagination and creativity—while still being able to do the narrowing that may inhere in much legal work. He tries to show what law can offer beyond the narrow utility that our skills can provide. He showed this to generations of students and readers and inspired many of us as teachers to try to do the same. Many students and lawyers find that the law’s narrow confines and readings will chafe. For some of these people, White’s approach will inspire them to take a very different and very humanistic approach to the law or their career, avoiding any narrow constraints of legal readings. For many more, I suspect, it will do something less radical but just as important: it will remind us that the law is a human enterprise, that it always serves social, human ends, and is a much broader and richer thing than just the tools of legal practice. The narrow way we read and talk is just a means by which we achieve the law’s ends; it not the way that we should conceive of the law. Perhaps the broadest lesson is that the narrow way we usually read in law should not become our whole lives, lest we suffer a professional myopia that will limit how we live. James Boyd White dedicated himself not just to teaching law, but to teaching lawyers how live, and he has done as much for that effort as anyone I know.
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