One must of course learn the rules of grammar and the meaning of terms, but to know those things is not to know how to speak the language. That knowledge comes only with use. The real difficulties and pleasures lie, not in knowing the rules of French or of law, but in knowing how to speak the language, how to make sense of it, how to use it to serve your purposes in life.
-James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination
Is law a language? Is poetry a language? Or are both methods of apprehending experience through language? Are poetry and law each discourses? Is law public and poetry private? Law authoritative and poetry subversive?
15 hours ago
1 comment:
This puts me in mind of Shakespeare's sonnets. the legal language of some of the metaphors, the similes, the contractual elements and aspects of what he is writing about , when writing about love, lust and law, the law of time, for instance, as opposed to the law of art. art as the law of timelessness
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