Law/Text/Past

University of California, Irvine Law Review, Vol. 1, p. 543, 2011

23 Pages Posted: 3 Apr 2012

See all articles by Steven Wilf

Steven Wilf

University of Connecticut School of Law

Date Written: September 1, 2011

Abstract

How might legal historians read text? What is particular about their modes of reading as opposed to those employed by readers in other disciplines? This essay will analyze the distinctive features of legal texts such as those stemming from the pervasive reliance upon conventions or boilerplate as part of a bricolage construction, the focus upon legitimizing gestures to official authority, and the normative, almost instrumental nature of many legal texts. While other sorts of texts might be more expressive, statutes, for example, always include a sanction. Drawing upon numerous examples, the paper identifies an expansive array of texts, including extra-official legalism; rituals, procedure, and nonverbal texts; and imagined law. While seeking to provide sharp, analytic definitions of what is a legal text, it will forge a path somewhere between establishing a new dichotomy of text/context and, alternatively, proclaiming that everything is text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). Without making a fetish of the problem of reading, I underscore the ways text might be chimerical, indeterminate, multivocal, slippery, and generally untrustworthy. Text has come to mean too much and too little.

Let me make clear what this paper is not about — it is not a guide to literary techniques for reading, a meandering meditation on the craft of history, or a manifesto for the importance of close readings. But I will situate the problem of text reading in our own historiographic milieu as legal historians. It is not simply the breakdown of the binary construct of law/society that leads to a more self-conscious understanding of how to read a legal historical text.

Legal history is particularly subject to a postmodern sensibility, which erodes interdisciplinary borders, jurisdictional boundaries, and divisions between official and extra-official justice, and which contributes to disintermediation and the loss of the interpretive monopolies of professional elites.

What is the role of the legal historian in this new world?

Keywords: Law and History, Law and Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law and Literature

Suggested Citation

Wilf, Steven, Law/Text/Past (September 1, 2011). University of California, Irvine Law Review, Vol. 1, p. 543, 2011, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2033917

Steven Wilf (Contact Author)

University of Connecticut School of Law ( email )

65 Elizabeth Street
Hartford, CT 06105
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
76
Abstract Views
713
Rank
567,594
PlumX Metrics