Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
In this contribution to the symposium celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, I have accepted White’s invitation in the last chapter of his magisterial book to think about poems and judicial opinions as compatible acts of imagination and meaning making. White asks brilliant questions, and his book is full of them, each a nugget of insight and also a prod that asks the reader to think harder, think deeper, revisit her first thoughts, to perhaps change her mind, and above all, with guidance, to educate herself. In this chapter of the book, White is chiefly interested in “how the legal imagination expresses itself in the judicial opinion,” and he frames that interest around a set of provocative questions about the form of the judicial opinion, what it demands, how it tells its story, how it manages its structural tensions, its constraints and possibilities, and the complex expectations that are brought to it.
White is also an exceptional reader of poetry, and this chapter yokes the judicial opinion to the poem (and the judge to the poet) in order to put his questions in the service of a larger preoccupation: “what is it about these two forms of expression that makes them sometimes so very much more” than “mere message” or legal rule. To help his reader understand poetry, White reproduces two short essays by Robert Frost, “The Constant Symbol,” and “The Figure a Poem Makes.” White then asks, using Frost’s locution, “what figure an opinion makes.” This is the question with which I begin my musings—to think and ponder along with White what figures a poem and an opinion make, what inheritance they draw from, what forms of imagination they require and excite, and how they manage the tensions of their forms. In the second part of the essay, I come at the juxtaposition of these genres from another direction, considering when they cross boundaries and gesture toward the meaning making capabilities of the other. I look at a poem that has qualities of a judicial opinion and a judicial opinion that has qualities of a poem in order to consider shared inheritances and shared forms of imagination.
Publication Citation
Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2024, Pp. 321-335.
Scholarly Commons Citation
Mezey, Naomi, "The (Still) Unexplored Possibilities of a Poetics of Law" (2024). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 2646.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2646