Reviewing Legal Fictions

Abstract

To appreciate how much warmth and light were generated when law, humanities, and spring marched into Georgia together last March, you really had to be there. We pondered James Boyd White's question, "What should be the erotics of legal criticism?," and wondered how such a question might conceivably relate to Robert Cover's jeremiad," It is a plain and nasty thought that death and pain are at the center of constitutional interpretation." Milner Ball's excellent work on law and metaphor provided crucial connectives; his call to batter the bulwarks and work toward organic and utopian possibilities helped rally the skeptics and even responded to the cynics. But that glorious early spring turned into Georgia's worst drought in a century, and the sudden death of Bob Cover intruded to change us all.