James Boyd White

"This collection of essays continues the work of James Boyd White in the rhetorical and literary analysis of law as a system for the creation of meaning. White's interest is in the intellectual and ethical possibilities of law, which he sees not merely as a logical enterprise, nor as a mere matter of politics and power, but rather as involving the activity of the whole mind, including its imaginative and affective capacities." "The essays here are united by two basic themes: the idea that law can usefully be regarded not only as a set of rules designed to produce results in the material world, as it usually is, but also as an imaginative and intellectual activity that has as its end the claim of meaning for human experience, both individual and collective; and, second, the idea that education, including in the law, works by the constant modification of expectation by experience." "From Expectation to Experience will interest lawyers, legal scholars, students of law, as well as those engaged in the fields of law and literature, ethics and literature, and rhetoric."--Jacket.

Papers presented at a conference held at the University of Michigan Law School, April 13-14, 2007.

"How do you imagine the world, and yourself and others within it? How do you confront the constraints of language, the evils of your particular culture, the limits of your own mind? How do you use what you imagine to give meaning to your past experience and shape your expectations for the future? Such are the questions that drive The Edge of Meaning by the distinguished humanist and lawyer James Boyd White.". "Addressing the most fundamental imaginative and intellectual activity of human life, this book presents an inspiring conception of an art of mind and language that enables us to confront the uncertainty and fluidity that are themselves the essence of human experience."--BOOK JACKET.

"This Book of Starres" is one of those all-too-rare books in which an author's love of someone's work - in this case, the writings of seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert - leads him to guide the reader on a journey of exploration. James Boyd White takes the position that "literature of this quality can be read by an ordinary intelligent reader, bringing whatever he or she happens to be to the process. This is a claim for the accessibility, and also the importance, of the great works of our tradition, so often now insulated by a kind of professional barrier.". Herbert's poetry presents a special set of challenges: it is to the modern ear archaic, difficult in thought and structure, and entirely theological in character. Yet no poet is more deeply admired by those who know him well. "This Book of Starres" engages its audience in a process of reading that shows this verse to be vivid and alive, speaking directly across the barriers of time and culture. It is the record of one person's life-changing involvement with Herbert's poetry; in this it is about not only how, but why we read great poetry.