Books by James Boyd White

James Boyd White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with St. Augustine's Confessions. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin-even for those who have never studied the language-guiding readers to experience the immediacy, urgency, and vitality of Augustine's writing.

James Boyd White addresses questions about how we imagine the world, and ourselves, and others within it. Also how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones.

A reflection on law as an intellectual and ethical pursuit

This study aims to teach the reader how to read and judge claims of authority made by others and how to decide to which institutions and practices should authority be granted. Thinkers such as Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela and Lincoln are incorporated into the discussion.

Neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire of force dominates. This book agrees that the relation between law and democracy in the US has been deteriorating badly, and that such changes are visible in an array of legal and governmental phenomena, such as legal teaching, judicial opinions, legal practice, and international relations.

Language is our key to imagining the world, others, and ourselves. Yet sometimes our ways of talking dehumanize others and trivialize human experience. In war other people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies those it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. Advertising reduces us to consumers, and cliches destroy the life of the imagination. How are we to assert our humanity and that of others against the forces in the culture and in our own minds that would deny it? What kind of speech should the First Amendment protect? How should judges and justices themselves speak? These questions animate James Boyd White's Living Speech, a profound examination of the ethics of human expression--in the law and in the rest of life. Drawing on examples from an unusual range of sources--judicial opinions, children's essays, literature, politics, and the speech-out-of-silence of Quaker worship--White offers a fascinating analysis of the force of our languages. Reminding us that every moment of speech is an occasion for gaining control of what we say and who we are, he shows us that we must practice the art of resisting the forces of inhumanity built into our habits of speech and thought if we are to become more capable of love and justice--in both law and life.

A pioneer in the law and humanities, James Boyd White here develops a way of criticizing the work of judges that he then uses as the basis for a more general method of cultural criticism. White argues that analytic philosophy and economics are inadequate as modes of legal criticism. He turns instead to the practice of translation to expose the intellectual and ethical center of legal experience and to connect it with other forms of cultural action. The unified vision of law and cultural process defined in this book provides a ground both for the criticism of law and for a general understanding of the ways in which we negotiate our identities and build our communities through language.