provided invaluable help at the final stage of this essay's preparation. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Charlie Musser for his early assistance in this project.
But our problem today is]... that we are in a state of great confusion and uncertainty (some might even say chaos) about what norms or "universals" ought to govern our practical lives.
A culture may be defined by the hold it has on us, how it holds us together in association.(John Rajchman, Le Savoir-Faire Avec L'lnconscient: Ethique et psychanalyse)Law embodies forms of communication, commemoration, and advocacy with a singular institutional authority: its meanings are backed by the power of the state. But law's power, like its meanings, is all over: not only in formal venues, such as courtrooms, legislatures, and government agencies, but also in everyday social practices (Sarat, 1990). People absorb a broad array of stories and images about the law, lawyers, and the legal system from books, newspapers, television news programs, documentaries, docudramas, and feature films. We carry these stories and images in our heads wherever we go, including voting booths and jury rooms, where legal meanings -popular, formal, and mixtures of the twotake effect.There is a two-way traffic between law and popular culture. Real legal issues and
I wish to thank Bruce Ackerman, Andre Rapaczynski, and Richard Uviller for their careful and penetrating comments upon an earlier draft of this work. Errors that remain are not for want of their efforts to have me do better. I also wish to thank Casey Tegreene for his helpful research assistance. (729) 730 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW Every language and every well-knit technical sublanguage incorporates certain points of view and certain patterned resistances to widely divergent points of view.-Benjamin Lee Whorf* To conceive of the law as a rhetorical and social system, a way in which we use an inherited language to talk to each other and to maintain a community, suggests in a new way that the heart of the law is what we always knew it was: the open hearing in which one point of view, one construction of language and reality, is tested against another.-James B. White** Hear my words, 0 ye wise men; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge. For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat. Let us. choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is good.-Old Testament*** * B. WHORF, LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND REALITY 247 (1956).
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