While I cannot appreciate the depth of discussion any more than the average lawyer, I very much appreciate your raising the subject at all and giving us a reason to think about it. It’s not much, but it’s a start. In my simplistic way, I’ve tried to pass this along to the folks in the trenches.

Of course, the interest in the two is not coincidental, as rhetoric was prized by the humanists primarily because it was rhetoric which could move people’s hearts to virtuous practice (or so though both classical rhetors like Cicero and Quintillian and medieval scholars like Petrarch and Erasmus).

Central to rhetoric, of course, is the notion of decorum, or tailoring one’s voice to suit the particular audience and the speaker/writer’s objectives. Though this seems almost self-evident, I daresay that finding a fit between a particular language and a given inquiry/audience is both more important and more difficult than is often thought, and these difficulties are only exacerbated by the “siloism” of the Academy.

White’s project for language is more constructive than that of Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, or even Stanley Fish (whose interpretive community argument is similar to White’s textual community). But it’s striking to me your note about when the book was written and its historical context.

Compare it to now, with the rise of ELS and the comparative stagnation of other critical theories. Even CRT now is more heavily influenced by the social sciences (social network theory, behavioral psychology, implicit cognition) than the humanities. Whither textual deconstruction or “storytelling”?

What’s interesting is that White was making an argument for a “literary” use of language as applied to the law, which would imply the support of constructive narrativity. Ironic when you think that at the same time the dominant project in the literature departments was to trash text, just as CLS trashed legal rules. Still, if law is more like the humanities than the social sciences, then it could do worse than to pick a discipline that (whether decontructionist or constructivist) was always concerned with the interpretation of language rather than metrics.

I say all of this, but for my SJD I’m going to do an organizational theory and an empirical project on the FMLA. Such is the current trend in my department.