Academic

Book Announcement:

By Lawrence Solum

Living Speech
Resisting the Empire of Force
James Boyd White

To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/ titles/8322.html

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 clichés 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.

"In Living Speech, White is rooted in his own proper study of the law, but he 'blurs' his work over in many directions, notably to classical drama, poetry, and philosophy, even with indirect traces and hints of theology. The effect is to summon readers--especially, but by no means exclusively, students of law--beyond the conventional limits and procedures of their discipline. . . . His book is an exercise in the humanities of a wise and urgent kind."--Walter Brueggeman, Michigan Law Review

Paper | $24.95 / £14.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-13837-4
Cloth  | $29.95 / £17.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-12580-0

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).