Digital Messing Around

In his column in the January 23rd New York Times, Stanley Fish suggests that parsing humanities texts using computers may be fun, but it can also lead us to find more than we were looking for.

Categorizing Approaches To Law and Culture

Menachem Mautner, Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, has published Three Approaches to Law and Culture at 96 Cornell Law Review 839 (2011). Here is the abstract.

This article discusses three major approaches connecting culture to law. The first is the historical school that arose in German jurisprudence in the first half of the nineteenth century. It views law as a product of a nation’s culture and as embedded in the daily practices of its people. The second approach is the constitutive approach that developed in American jurisprudence in the 1980s. This approach views law as participating in the constitution of culture and thereby in the constitution of people’s minds, practices, and social relations. The third approach, found in twentieth-century Anglo-American jurisprudence, views the law that the courts create and apply as a distinct cultural system. Law practitioners internalize this culture in the course of their studies and professional activity, and this internalization comes to constitute, direct, and delimit the way these practitioners think, argue, resolve cases, and provide justifications. The writings of Karl Llewellyn, James Boyd White, Pierre Bourdieu and Stanley Fish are discussed. Beyond these three approaches the article points out nine additional approaches in legal scholarship concerning the relationship between law and culture. This mapping is tentative. It is hoped, however, that it gives readers a preliminary idea of the widespread use of the concept of culture in the law and that it invites further reflection on other possible ways to employ the concept of culture in legal scholarship for a richer understanding of the legal phenomenon.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Still Writing After All These Years

Mark Bauerlein reflects on Stanley Fish's career and achievements in a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Link here.

Stanley Fish On "The Fugitive"

Jenny Diski reviews Stanley Fish's new book The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) in the London Review of Books here.

Seasons 1 and 2 of The Fugitive, starring David Janssen, William Conrad, and Barry Morse, is available on DVD. Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones starred in the 1993 movie version; Jones reprised his U.S. Marshal role (Samuel Gerard) in the film U. S. Marshals (1998). Wesley Snipes and Robert Downey, Jr. co-starred.

Capers on Post-Colonial and Black Literary Theory and Legal Texts

Professor I. Bennett Capers (Hofstra Law School) has posted on SSRN the article, Reading Back, Reading Black, 35 Hofstra L. Rev. 101 (2007):

This essay builds on post-colonial theory and black literary theory to pose a pair of questions. If the reading of Western literature can be enriched by examining the great canonical texts through the lens of race, can a similar enrichment obtain from using a similar reading practice to read the law? Stanley Fish has argued that we each belong to interpretive communities, and that members of these communities are guided in their readings of texts by a common "consciousness," which produces interpretive "strategies [that] exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read." If this is true, what does it mean for the study of law to have a community of black readers?

This essay engages these questions and attempts to describe a reading practice of reading black. To illustrate the reading practice, the essay examines two cases that do not appear to be engaged in "race work" at all, The Queen v. Dudley & Stephens, and Muller v. Oregon. The essay demonstrates that far from diminishing these opinions—these grand narratives, these master texts—reading black reveals other layers, other meanings, and in the process deepens and widens our understanding not only of the holdings of these opinions, but also the how and why of them.