So what can the humanities teach us about law? Today the humanities occupy a small corner of the law school curriculum, “refracting and redacting” the law from a safe distance. Might they instead become a more vibrant partner in legal education? Might law and humanities scholarship escape the pages of law reviews and teach us something important about how to read and understand the law? I hope that these small examples have pointed us in the direction of an answer, one consistent with a vision of law quite different from Langdell’s. James Boyd White has given us such a vision. He critiqued the law as Langdell saw it and offered us a richer view; a view that might justify a life well lived in the law. Looking back over his long and remarkable career, he wrote:
I have been resisting an image of law as rules and policy, but behind those things is a deeper vision: of law as abstract, mechanical, impersonal, essentially bureaucratic in nature, narrowing rather than broadening the human capacity for experience, understanding, imagination, and empathy. To focus on the law as a system, and not on what happens when that system meets the world—and the people of the world—is to strip it of its difficulty, its life, its meaning, and its value.
For it is at this moment, when the law meets the world—in the work of lawyer, judge, or teacher—that it becomes most fully alive. This moment contains within it the seeds of resistance to the forces of mindless empire and control, for every case is an opportunity for newness of thought, for creativity and surprise, for the introduction into the world of power an unrecognized voice, language, or claim.
In the moment of speech, or writing, there is always the possibility that one can bring the world into new life.
Despite the long theoretical dominance of legal realism in scholarly circles, much of legal education as we know it has remained mired in Langdell’s formalist vision of the law—a vision of a narrow, abstract, impersonal system bereft of human meaning and value. But we can do better. We can approach law, and teach our students to approach law, not as a set of rules but as a form of life. If we decide to take up this life-giving journey, it is the humanities that can show us the way.
