Heracles' Bow: Essays On The Rhetoric & Poetics Of The Law (Rhetoric of the Human Sciences) - Softcover

"These lucid, eloquent, and imaginative essays should be read by everyone who cares about the values that underpin our legal tradition. By showing what it means to be committed to a 'a culture of argument' Professor White demonstrates the connection between legal and moral experience. And this is done, not abstractly, but by close analysis of classical and modern text. There is a welcome freshness and excitement here, and I can think of no better way of getting a handle of the study of law as a humane discipline."--Philip Selznick, Emeritus Professor of Law and Sociology, The University of California-Berkeley "This is a remarkable book. At a time when many writers in the field aspire to subsume the law entirely under the social sciences, and of those the most dismal, it is both refreshing and illuminating to find law presented as an art, as a creative human activity, as an approximation to poetry at least in the sense of a 'making' in a culture, but in a stronger sense, too, One result, not the most important but not the least important, either, is a book written in a style which is free of jargon and a delight to read. White's portrait of the law is, as he freely grants, idealized; but his utopia is rare in that, given the opportunity, political animals and rational bipeds might well freely choose to live within it."--Arthur Adkins, Department of Classical Languages, The University of Chicago "Heracles' Bow is a beautifully written, learned, and broad-ranging contribution to current thinking about the nature of law and the legal enterprise. . . . This book should prove valuable not only to students and teachers of law and jurisprudence, but to all those who are interested in understanding the relationship between law, rhetoric, and culture."--Cass R. Sunstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago

The law has traditionally been regarded as a set of rules and institutions. In this thoughtful series of essays, James Boyd White urges a fresh view of the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. Defining and elaborating his conception, he artfully bridges the fields of jurisprudence, literature, philosophy, history, and political science. The result, a new approach that may change the way we perceive the legal process, will engage not only lawyers and law students but anyone interested in the relationship between ethics, persuasion, and community.

White's essays, though bound by a common perspective, are thematically varied. Each of these pieces makes eloquent and insightful reading. Taken as a whole, they establish, by triangulation, a position from which they all proceed: a view of poetry, law, and rhetoric as essentially synonymous. Only when we perceive the links between these processes, White stresses, can we begin to unite the concerns of truth, beauty, and justice in a single field of action and expression.