Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism.

Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism. The historical evolution of interdisciplinarity points to thefragmentation of knowledge that occurred from the 16th through the 19thcenturies, as an inciting force for its development, as well as thegrowth of materialistic empirical systems that led to highly specializedscientific pursuits. Within interdisciplinary studies there appears tobe considerable confusion even over such basic questions as whatconstitutes interdisciplinarity. Is it more a question of transcendingboundaries and mixing genres or a profound restructuring of the way wethink? One view suggests that its roots lie in "evoking a commonepistemology of convergence, (Klein 11) that contests disciplinarydivisions in pursuit of unitary knowledge. Yet another holds that it isreally a practical tool to counter the "dispersion ofdiscourse" (Klein 13) that hampers integrative solutions to complexproblems. Common values, by either of these definitions, areinterdisciplinarity's friend and particularization par��tic��u��lar��ize?v. par��tic��u��lar��ized, par��tic��u��lar��iz��ing, par��tic��u��lar��iz��esv.tr.1. To mention, describe, or treat individually; itemize or specify.2. of knowledge itsenemy. Jerry Leonard in Legal Studies as Cultural Studies: a reader in(post) modern critical theory (1995), for one, finds the questions ofboundaries intriguing, if hardly constraining,as he seeks not merely toredraw To redisplay an image on screen whether text or graphics. The concept is that the first time elements are displayed, they are "drawn," and if something is changed, they are "redrawn." Applications often have a Refresh command that redraws the screen. them but to question why they need exist at all. James Boyd White James Boyd White (born 1938) is an American law professor, literary critic, scholar and philosopher who is generally credited with founding the "Law and Literature" movement and is the preeminent proponent of the analysis of constitutive rhetoric in the analysis of legal texts. in Acts of Hope Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics(1994), for another, addresses his work not to the specialist, for then"it would not cohere cohere (kōhēr´),v to stick together, to unite, to form a solid mass. as a book, because the various chapters belongto different scholarly fields" (270). His solution is to work out aset of questions to connect across disciplinary boundaries (what Whiterefers to as "the lines of professionalism," 271). Texts arethus no longer the property of one group or another, nor need one speakthe language of the specialist to address them. Rather, one may speakout of one's own person and mind, claiming such texts "as aninheritance that is common to us all....The test for Thoreau is alwayshis own experience. It is out of a similar sense of the individuality inmyself, and in my reader, that I write" (271). Whatever meaning interdisciplinarity might have for us, it isclear that at its most insistent application it is more than merelysharing categories, methods, or perspectives. It means more than merelyusing one discipline to pursue inquiry into another. It is less likebridge-building than it is like restructuring knowledge, insofar in��so��far?adv.To such an extent.Adv. 1. insofar - to the degree or extent that; "insofar as it can be ascertained, the horse lung is comparable to that of man"; "so far as it is reasonably practical he should practice as thelatter implies marauding ma��raud?v. ma��raud��ed, ma��raud��ing, ma��raudsv.intr.To rove and raid in search of plunder.v.tr.To raid or pillage for spoils. across disciplinary boundaries in ways thateffectively deny their existence and in ways that consequently critiquethe prevailing tectonics of knowledge. Such restructuring does notrequire and may in fact resist a transcendent master paradigm; it couldmerely represent a higher order of recognition that the development ofknowledge has moved outside traditional domains or that emerginginnovative knowledge resists its constraints. By this reading,interdisciplinarity decries boundedness and invokes complexity, theformer as a pariah and the latter as a grail. Stanley Fish Stanley Fish (born 1938) is a prominent American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is among the most important critics of the English poet John Milton in the 20th century, and is often associated with post-modernism, at declares in There's No Such thing as FreeSpeech: And It's a Good Thing, Too (1994) that "[t]heimpossibility of authentic critique is the impossibility of theinterdisciplinary project" (242). Fish goes on to contend that thedenial of a disciplinary perspective itself represents no more thantaking on an antidisciplinary discipline: "the interdisciplinaryimpulse finally does not liberate us from the narrow confines ofacademic ghettos to something more capacious; it merely redomiciles usin enclosures that do not advertise themselves as such" (237).Indeed, Fish reaches the conclusion that "[b]eing interdisciplinaryis more than hard to do; it is impossible to do" (237-238).Expanding further on that view, Fish takes the strong reading thatdisciplines assert their purpose and identity under conditions in whichthey must continually achieve and re-achieve their autonomy "byingesting material previously external to it" (220). Moreover, asinterlopers INTERLOPERS. Persons who interrupt the trade of a company of merchants, by pursuing the same business with them in the same place, without lawful authority. into disciplinary areas are incorporated, they areincorporated in terms of the "core sense of the enterprise,"that is, "in a form demanded by the definitions, distinctions,convention, problematics, and urgencies already in place" (220).Arguing against the notion that interdisciplinarity, by creating a vastinterconnected community, eliminates difference, Fish contends that bothlocal situatedness and partial perspective are inescapable, that is,they are conditions of being human. Indeed, disciplines withinthemselves, as Levinson and Mailloux (1988) agree, make very strongclaims to a certain unity, albeit limited and self-contained, ofknowledge. Thus, Fish denies that interdisciplinarity results, in CliffordGeertz's terms, in "blurred genres" (19-35) that allow usto redraw the cultural map; rather, interdisciplinarity is notemancipatory e��man��ci��pate?tr.v. e��man��ci��pat��ed, e��man��ci��pat��ing, e��man��ci��pates1. To free from bondage, oppression, or restraint; liberate.2. (as Jerry Leonard clearly expects it should be), and, asBrook Thomas elaborates, Fish's unmasking of the "real"still leaves us with the reality of the real. Whatever change shouldoccur is not the result of theoretical self-reflexivity as if reflectionwere superior to practice. Indeed, theory is itself a practice andtherefore proceeds from within a set of practices or a perspective.Theory does not stand outside of history but is itself immersed incontingency" (Thomas 64). Like theory, interdisciplinarity isrooted in practices and, as such, has not the capacity to alter existingpractices. Interdisciplinarity cannot be said to have priority over anyother practice since it is itself situated and cannot achieve a position"outside." If we were then to look for the disruptive force ofinterdisciplinary, Fish could find it, according to according toprep.1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.2. In keeping with: according to instructions.3. Thomas, only in theability of the practice to act as "a culturally constructedactivity helping to induce doubts about particular disciplinarypractices, (88). Fish himself holds that its true value is in inducingchange of the type that emerges when, having ingested material externalto itself, a field re-achieves itself. It does so "as the law takesunto itself and makes its own the materials that history and chance putin its way" (220); in so doing, it alters the "own" it ismaking. The real-world prospect for interdisciplinary relations in lawis thus reduced in Fish to the disciplinary terms of law as practice. Ifit were to blur boundaries, to truly restructure its knowledge, toaccept the infinite regression of its frames, or to disallow To exclude; reject; deny the force or validity of.The term disallow is applied to such things as an insurance company's refusal to pay a claim. the commandof singular authority, it would no longer be law but something else.Rather, if Fish is to be taken as definitive, legal subjects areunlikely to find themselves liberated from the disciplinary definitionsand Problematics of the law, nor will the law find itself absolved ofdifferences. In law, not only as a subject of study but as an intellectualinstitution, interdisciplinarity assumes the need for fundamentalchange, change that has been enriched by an outpouring ofinterdisciplinary work that one critic considers "represents, inlaw, the intellectual development of our time" (Collier 193). Atthe same time, the "use" of other disciplines is challenged bythe same critic as an "abuse" insofar as it asks of law anintellectual authority of which law is not capable. Collier's pointis that radically different structures of authority texist) in law andthe humanities" (194), such that theory from one domain vainlyseeks to provide a source of authority for the other. indeed,Collier's citations indicate a view not of integrative scholarshipbetween disciplines but of "scavenging" (Tushnet) and"ransacking" (Posner). Citing legal theorizing rooted inrhetoric, epic drama, metaphor, narrative, agons, poetry, hermeneutics,and literary theory, Collier contends that law offers a tempting targetfor scholars from other disciplines, but concludes that the world theyaddress has the same relation to legal reality as poetry to nurseryrhymes. in interdisciplinary terms, he considers the value of suchboundary-loping as minimal given a pragmatic, problem-solvingunderstanding of legal politics as practiced at ground level. Here, wefind little concern for the isolation of law as a discourse, littlesense of how to construct realities other than its own, littleappreciation, even within a problematic solving understanding, for thepotential for "consultant" (commonly informed) rather than"contracted" (separately constituted) modes of knowledge(Klein 58). And yet, Collier's view appears not only to representmainstream legal thinking but to reflect a concern shared by many ofthose who are themselves engaged within the law in interdisciplinaryscholarship. We find it expressed, for example, in the kinds of implicitlimits placed on interdisciplinary scholarship in such a collection ofessays as Papke's Narrative and the Legal Discourse: A Reader inStorytelling and the Law (1991), a reader made up of thirteen previouslypublished pieces by diverse hands. On its face, Papke's collectionasserts the priority of a narrative methodology in organizing entireareas of case law: "even jurisprudence, that is, formal theorizingabout the law, relies on narrative, (1). This subjectifying approach tothe law is given credit for countering the objective effects ofpositivism positivism(pŏ`zĭtĭvĭzəm), philosophical doctrine that denies any validity to speculation or metaphysics. Sometimes associated with empiricism, positivism maintains that metaphysical questions are unanswerable and that the only and legal scientism sci��en��tism?n.1. The collection of attitudes and practices considered typical of scientists.2. The belief that the investigative methods of the physical sciences are applicable or justifiable in all fields of inquiry. by introducing the effects ofstorytelling in legal education, litigation An action brought in court to enforce a particular right. The act or process of bringing a lawsuit in and of itself; a judicial contest; any dispute.When a person begins a civil lawsuit, the person enters into a process called litigation. , and doctrine andconsidering alternative legal narratives. While it reveals a fascinationwith the narrative influences of storytelling, Papke's work isnevertheless clearly concerned with the pragmatic use to which suchinfluences will be put. That is, storytelling will ultimately either beput to use to change law by informing legal doctrine Legal doctrine is a framework, set of rules, procedural steps, or test, often established through precedent in the common law, through which judgments can be determined in a given legal case. or it willreinforce prevailing modes of law by framing them more effectively.Study should thus be of legal practice in the context of the dominantlegal culture or legal conceptualizations. So stated, its understandingis at best rudimentary, a direct literal application of storyingtechniques (those of Northrup Frye, A.J. Greimas, Vladimir Propp Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Russian: Владимир Яковлевич Пропп; 29 April O.S. , andKenneth Burke Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5 1897 – November 19 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics. Early life , among others) to the legal milieu as a means, not ofliberating law, but of recognizing that it functions best as a"human activity which provides meaning" (4) thereby at mostrelieving its isolation as a discipline. In an alternate view of interdisciplinarity in law, in particularhow law relates to art and science, John Cole John Cole may refer to the following people: John Cole (bobsleigh), who competed for the United States. John Cole (journalist), from the United Kingdom. John Cole (businessman), from Australia. (1988) reframes thedilemma of the legal enterprise as intended to gain a firmer"purchase on its meaning" (911). But frames prove to containthe possibility of including other, receding frames, an infiniteregression that retards the search for an ultimate truth. All accountsare thereby thrown into doubt so that they exist in a perpetual state ofbeing both true and false at the same time. Choice is thus betweenneither a bad and a good, or a good and a better, but between twoequally valuable possibilities. Moreover, given receding frames, thepossibilities soon become part of the infinite regression of which wespoke. That is, for example, guilt -- a preeminent concern of the law --may be a question of a defendant's being both guilty and not guiltyor guilty and/or not guilty; or is and is not guilty and is or is notguilty, or is and is not guilty or is or is not guilty, and so on,giving us either an infinite freedom to create our world or forcing usto recognize that the world is essentially unframeable in any way wecould discover (given that we are ourselves within a frame and cannotstep outside of it to check our framing). This is something that, whilelawyers deal with it every day, cannot be checked against any givenreality. But it does force a conversation, not merely between a frameand an assumed reality but between frames. In Cole's system, ourlabeling process and translation between the languages of the framestake center stage. The question then becomes how do we both create andcheck our frames except although language, so that law becomes more andmore the very alternative that Collier considered as unrelated toreal-world law as poetry to nursery rhymes. James Boyd White (deservedly considered the founder of the law andliterature movement) takes up in Acts of hope the issue of authorityraised by Collier and regards it both in real world terms and with anunderstanding of the kind of frames with which Coles is concerned. Whitefocuses on those who define anew the institution of law in terms of itspractices, creating their own meaning. At the same time, White refusesto concede that any single understanding of authority is itselfauthoritative. Rather, each authority is itself referred to thecommunity which it creates and for which that authority is claimed. Itis then regarded in the fight of other claims to authority as well asthat authority we ourselves as speakers and readers "create in ourown acts of thought and speech" (xii). White thus invites us tothink of the public world as a set of languages capable of beingperformed, that is, thought, talked, and acted. These languages may betaught, resisted, transformed, but they must be examined and madeconscious@ they must be imagined as an activity and not as objects, aspractices and not institutions, as operating communities and not ascommands. In sum, we are to regard authority not as that which isgranted or denied but as that which is created and in progress, a wayof creating an identity for oneself and making a relation to others,(304). In a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (1991) devoted tohis work, White clarifies the title of one of his works, When Words Losetheir Meaning, asserting that "The Idea of die title--key word ofwhich is `when'--is not that the book is about the process by whichmeaning is lost, but that it is about what happens next, how we canrespond to that loss when we learn that it has occurred" (69). Inthis sense, White's work has represented and continues to representa form of action, that is, language is material upon which we must act.Commensurably com��men��su��ra��ble?adj.1. Measurable by a common standard.2. Commensurate; proportionate.3. Mathematics Exactly divisible by the same unit an integral number of times. Used of two quantities. , "the law is a rhetorical system" (77) by meansof which we must persuade others, in line with a communication paradigmthat posits a process of senders transmitting a message through a mediumto a receiver. This is not to say that for White texts disappear.Clearly he is not, like Cole, recommending Barthian readings in lawschools" (White quoting Richard Rorty who trembles at thethought," 73), for texts and selves constitute the very material ofwhich action is to be made. Taking such a position, White still leaveshimself open to Richard Weisberg's attack on the humanist front,for his preoccupation with rhetoric and how it reaches us containswithin it the prospect of eschewing a certain "rightness" thatattends the responsibility of judgment and betrays a greater concern forthe process of legal discourse than for its goal. By this argument,White may very well have no more to say than keep walking, keeptalking,, so that law becomes little more than rhetoric put to theservice of any goal. In Acts of Hope, White goes to some lengths to address suchconcerns as they relate to issues of authority, its source and validity,and the responsibility one carries in creating, denying, or endorsingauthority, whether it emanates from God, the crown, the state, thecourts, or the individual. In tracing the relations of institutions andindividuals, White explores a variety of texts in both the private andthe public worlds (from Plato's Crito, Nelson Mandela's speechfrom the dock, and Supreme Court opinions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the constitutionality of several Pennsylvania state regulations regarding abortion was challenged. to Emily Dickinson's poetry and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park Mansfield Park may mean: Mansfield Park (novel) by Jane Austen Mansfield Park (film), based on the novel, directed by Patricia Rozema, starring Frances O'Connor, Embeth Davidtz, and Sheila Gish in 1999 Mansfield Park (1983 TV serial) ).His readings invite us to think of these texts not as objects ofauthority but as open to our participation, transformation, andcritique; at the same time, he warns us, we shall never entirely escapeor resist the ways that have made us, for they are us. In this sense,law is itself not a command but "community and culture operating incertain ways" (305). Who are the speakers, White asks, and what aretheir relations; what is the community for which authority is claimedand what are its claims; when do we grant or deny authority, and why?"And as speakers ourselves: What kinds of authorities should wecreate in our own acts of thought and speech?" (xii) White'swork, summed in this way, could be regarded as a form ofcommunity-building, of redefining society, and of the assumption ofgreater individual responsibility for both social institutions and thepractices we ourselves engage in. For all his exercise of social and individual responsibility,White nevertheless does not get much beyond Weisberg's criticism.His method is, ultimately, one whereby his interest in how language iscreated overrides his felt need to reach conclusions. His preoccupationis with opening up possibilities for thought, drawing attention toresponses that speak to the philosophic rather than the propositionalcharacter of the management of the relation between world and self"(310). Nowhere is this clearer than in White's commentaries on hisown practice of writing and the politics of his profession that appearin italicized sections at the end of all but one chapter and in his noteon method. Here White is most revealing. Yes, he seems to admit, he is acultural conservative. His texts are those of the Western Canon, areflection, he concedes, of his own education and tastes. But"other texts could serve the same purpose....I expect my readers tohave their own array of texts" (310). Reconstructing his approachfrom his commentaries, we find White making sense for himself of textshe has chosen for sense-making. Others are free to see what they see:"This does not mean, however, that we should not talk about what wesee" (43). And even in his own way of seeing, White admits hisemphasis is not on the foreignness of the text; its alienness may be hisstarting point Noun 1. starting point - earliest limiting pointterminus a quocommencement, get-go, offset, outset, showtime, starting time, beginning, start, kickoff, first - the time at which something is supposed to begin; "they got an early start"; "she knew from the but it does not take emphasis; it is rather that which he"overcomes" by making sense in his own language, by connectingits life with his/our own, "to make an old text present in ourworld" (44). No talk here of otherness, of difference, orperiodicity periodicity/pe��ri��o��dic��i��ty/ (per?e-ah-dis��i-te) recurrence at regular intervals of time. pe��ri��o��dic��i��tyn.1. or epistemes, just of "overcoming" the fact of thealien, of reading to connect irrespective of irrespective ofprep.Without consideration of; regardless of.irrespective ofpreposition despitethe problems of how theperiod reads itself or of reading across history into periods not likeour own. In all fairness to White, he acknowledges his detractors in hischapter postscripts, including one friend who remarks, "your booktreats works that are all drawn exclusively from the humanistictradition of Western high culture... you are necessarily claiming thatWestern culture has a unique value, and that you and your readers allbelong to it and affirm its premises" (80). But, White rejoins, Idefine myself as belonging to a certain culture. I make no claim for thepriority of this culture, however, or for these texts, but I do fortheir value." White defends the high culture of the WesternEuropean tradition as "ours," as part of our shared life.Thus, one of his objects is to reconstitute re��con��sti��tute?tr.v. re��con��sti��tut��ed, re��con��sti��tut��ing, re��con��sti��tutes1. To provide with a new structure: The parks commission has been reconstituted.2. this tradition, not to makeothers think as he does, although, of course, his book works toresurrect the authority of just this tradition, even if his is aninvitation, rather than a command, to join him. Again and again, White surfaces the incompatibilities of ourdiscourses and the function of choice, as if one has a choice whichdiscourse s/he will be informed, conditioned, determined by. It issufficient, he seems to suggest, to deny the existence of a"superdiscourse" for the effects of such a discourse to ceaseto control our talk. The texts he has chosen for his readings are, heclaims, models for just such freedom of choice. But White is less thanconvincing when he chooses texts like Hooker's Laws ofEcclesiasticall Politie Wiven its limited tolerance for radical,reformists) or the Casey opinion Wiven the collapse of legal argument itexhibits in the face of hostile litigation). Moreover, even those whoseem more amenable to offering an olive branch olive branchsymbol of peace and serenity. [Gk. and Rom. Myth.: Brewer Handbook; O.T.: Genesis, 8:11]See : Peace (like Hale in"Considerations Touching the Amendment or Alteration of Lawes"or Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address) themselves represent in thestances they have taken voices of conservatism, that is, forces of"the conservation of culture, of the past, both for its own valueand as a force for educating the necessary partialities of thepresent--any present--into a fuller recognition of its own limits"(152). Even White's posing of the question to which the Hooker andHale texts must respond ("How is one to behave and talk in the faceof a social evil that is at once radical and fundamental?" 152)itself belies the false neutrality of White's"conversation." Let us take the case of Casey as the best example of White'sfailed promise. In this, as in White's other texts, the institutionwhose authority is in question (here the Court, in Austen the mannersand morals of the period, in Dickinson the expectations of poeticdiscourse) inscribes itself into the text@ that is, it is not merelydescribed in but is enacted by the text, so that by means of the textthe institution argues its own authority. In this sense, White'sclaim that we are dealing with the systems of language rather thansystems of power is revealed as a fraud. We are not being"offered" other "ways of thinking and talking otherwiseunavailable" (223) so much as we are being presented with a fact ofpower. The question that should be of interest then cannot be, as Whiteposes it, how the Court goes about thinking and talking about theissue; how it makes itself, and its various audiences in the process;how it defines the intellectual and conversational process that is thelaw to which it asks that authority be given" (183) or even how canwe reach a shared view we can live with to address our differences. In Casey (as, indeed, in the preceding Supreme Court abortion caseWebster v. Reproductive Health Services In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, 109 S. Ct. 3040, 106 L. Ed. 2d 410 (1989), the United States Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of several Missouri statutes restricting access to Abortion services and counseling. , 1989) none of the centralissues are really addressed: "whether (and when) a fetus is a humanbeing and the extent of women,s autonomy in sexual and reproductivematters" (Kairys 162). Precedent, in the form of Roe'strimester trimester/tri��mes��ter/ (-mes��ter) a period of three months. tri��mes��tern.A period of three months.TrimesterThe first third or 13 weeks of pregnancy. framework and the strict scrutiny A standard of Judicial Review for a challenged policy in which the court presumes the policy to be invalid unless the government can demonstrate a compelling interest to justify the policy. test were both abandoned,and states were allowed to impose restrictions on the right to abortionshort of an "undue burden." In what sense, then, can Whiteclaim that a conversation has truly been engaged, that the past had been"preserved as valuable" (152), that we can claim we have(having faded to reach a shared view based on the merits on the meritsadj. referring to a judgment, decision or ruling of a court based upon the facts presented in evidence and the law applied to that evidence. A judge decides a case "on the merits" when he/she bases the decision on the fundamental issues and considers ) respectedthose who disagree with Verb 1. disagree with - not be very easily digestible; "Spicy food disagrees with some people"hurt - give trouble or pain to; "This exercise will hurt your back" us? What White has demonstrated is that fidelityto the law becomes an important ethical possibility" (183), thatis, a fact of power; if, for White, how we arrived at such an impasse isthe crucial question ("fidelity to the law" being a falsetranscendent in any democratic conversation that truly engages indialogue), he has clearly assumed away critical underlying questions ofpower relations. An interesting wrinkle in White's argument is the apparentinfluence such an approach has come to have in legal analysis of Casey.Robin West, for example, describes Alan Brownstein's analysis ofCasey as "a newly explicit acknowledgment of what in reality is aquite old conception of rights: The assertion of a right operates not asa trump, but rather as the opening to a regulatory conversation, inwhich the collective, or the community, or the society, through themechanism of state regulation, defines, as well as limits and burdens,the content of the right" (962). What West brings home to us,relevant to White's approach, is that the notion of a"conversation" as a means of addressing the relations ofcommunity and individual allows existing institutional power to"trump" emergent rights. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently ,"conversation" allows the party with the more powerful voiceto drown out Verb 1. drown out - make imperceptible; "The noise from the ice machine drowned out the music"make noise, noise, resound - emit a noise weaker voices, in contra-distinction to what theConstitution itself intends in its counter-majoritarian promise toprotect minority views. Indeed, in West's subsequent review of"conversations" within the abortion debate The abortion debate refers to discussion and controversy surrounding the moral and legal status of abortion. The two main groups involved in the abortion debate are the pro-choice movement, which generally supports access to abortion and regards it as morally permissible, and the , the minoritarianposition is "shouted down" by abortion advocates andpro-lifers alike for one countervailing reason or another: from itsfailure to assert mind over body, its violation of relational feminism,its privileging of privacy, and its preference for the individual overcommunity to its protectionism. By contrast, West asks for the right toopt out of the power-based conversation, based on its unequal andunparalleled harms to women. Moreover, she posits that no"unequal" voice be forced to participate in such conversationsuntil society itself (the context and condition of all suchconversations) itself becomes a just society. If we turn to the particulars of feminist methodologies in such acollection as Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman'sRepresenting Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism (1994), readings inlaw and literature take on a focus that embraces the very issues ofpower that White seems to side step. Taking the idea of"representation" as its organizing theme (based on a symposiumat the University of Texas School of Law The University of Texas School of Law is an ABA-certified American law school located on The University of Texas at Austin campus. The law school has been in existence since the founding of the University in 1883. that provides five of itsthirteen collected essays), the Heinzehnan and Wiseman book insists thatwomen are disadvantaged by discipline-specific approaches to theirrepresentation and that feminism requires a broader interdisciplinarymethodology to question traditional productions of knowledge. Clearlines and reductive re��duc��tive?adj.1. Of or relating to reduction.2. Relating to, being an instance of, or exhibiting reductionism.3. Relating to or being an instance of reductivism. terminology are placed at issue as more complicatedcategories of representation are given value to expose "complex andinterconnected power relationships, (viii) and to give space to woman asa speaking subject. For whom she speaks is left open to contest as isthe audience to which she speaks, issues variously addressed in theessays collected. What the collection presumes to address more directlyare the three issues covered by the three Parts of the book@ how thestories of women are restrained by disciplinary boundaries, howideological agendas that counter a storyteller's interests might beperpetuated by her story, and how the power of representation dependsupon the historical context of a story and its telling. Problems in representation run the gamut from who represents us,what is represented, and how that representation is accomplished to thelegitimacy of such representation based on consensus, imposed or assumedauthority, and the essence as, well as the difference implicit in Adj. 1. implicit in - in the nature of something though not readily apparent; "shortcomings inherent in our approach"; "an underlying meaning"underlying, inherent sharedmembership in a group. As framed in an insightful essay by Martha Minow("From Class Action to `Miss Saigon': The Concept ofRepresentation in the Law"), such representation constitutes there-presentation of human experience and, as a result, implicates thequestion of who can speak for us, if not ourselves, and the extent towhich empathy and the relational is thereby impacted. Methodologicalquestions related to representation take us inevitably to narrativeconstructions (about which Kathryn Abrams's "The Narrative andthe Normative in Legal Scholarship Lawyers and Judges What Shall Be Done with the Practice of the Courts? Contracts The Path of the Law , speaks informatively) with which thevolume is particularly preoccupied (in pieces as varied asHeinzehnan's "Guilty in Law, Implausible in Fiction:Jurisprudential and Literary Narratives in the Case of Mary Blandy,Parricide PARRICIDE, civil law. One who murders his father; it is applied, by extension, to one who murders his mother, his brother, his sister, or his children. The crime committed by such person is also called parricide. Merl. Rep. mot Parricide; Dig. 48, 9, 1, 1. 3, 1. 4. ," Rita Copeland's "Why Women Can't ReadMedieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard HeresyTrials," Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's "Pornography andCanonicity: The Case of Yeat's `Leda and the Swan'," andMargaret Anne Doody's "Voice of Record: Women as Witnesses andDefendants in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers"). Here, thecollection exposes not only the heterogeneity of such approaches as wellas questions of reliability and objectivity but the legitimacy ofderiving generalities (that is, the abstract frameworks and normativeproposals necessary to the formation of specific legal rules) from suchcontext-specific constructions as experiential narratives. This, ofcourse, is all in addition to the problem of integrating "excludedvoices" into mainstream narratives of the dominant legal agenda(the focus of Angela P. Harris's now-classic piece "Race andEssentialism essentialismIn ontology, the view that some properties of objects are essential to them. The “essence” of a thing is conceived as the totality of its essential properties. in Feminist Legal Theory Feminist legal theory is based on the belief that the law has been instrumental in women's historical subordination. The project of feminist legal theory is twofold. First, feminist jurisprudence seeks to explain ways in which the law plays a role in women's subordinate status. ") and the problem ofincorporating challenges to a dominant practice into the dominantpractice itself (as Estrich considers in applying her foundational workon rape law to sexual harassment sexual harassment,in law, verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature, aimed at a particular person or group of people, especially in the workplace or in academic or other institutional settings, that is actionable, as in tort or under equal-opportunity statutes. law in "Sex at Work"). Jerry Leonard's Legal Studies as Cultural Studies takes aneven more aggressive tack on the dialogue between dominant and excludedlegal languages or discourses, holding that the conflicting visions theyrepresent clash in "a highly contested field of questioning andtheorizing" (2) in which the general goal is the contestation ofinjustice. Leonard views law in terms of the interdisciplinarity ofcultural studies of three types: experiential, textual, and critical.The experiential accesses meaning through direct experience, questioningwhat, gives value, giving voice to excluded experiences, and privilegingexperience over knowledge. The textual, regarding as primary thequestion of how other than dominant truths are repressed in the culturalscene, engages "how" we constitute what we value and writesagainst the grain of the dominant to activate resistance from withinthose outsider voices. It does so by, close readings of the unsaid andby positing the indeterminacy in��de��ter��mi��na��cy?n.The state or quality of being indeterminate.Noun 1. indeterminacy - the quality of being vague and poorly definedindefiniteness, indefinity, indeterminateness, indetermination of discourses as they are read bydifferent readers. By contrast, the critical transcends texts to situate sit��u��ate?tr.v. sit��u��at��ed, sit��u��at��ing, sit��u��ates1. To place in a certain spot or position; locate.2. To place under particular circumstances or in a given condition.adj. them in historical and social contexts. It attacks thetaken-for-grantedness of "obvious" knowledge by asking"why" and by putting certain meanings into question. Adoptinga critical legal studies approach, Leonard considers he has supersededthe discourses of experientiality and textuality Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields. at the same time thatthose discourses intersect and articulate differences. Rather, heregards his anthologized collection of ten essays (in three Parts -- thesubject, the sign, and the political -- ranging from such pieces asGayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Constitutions and Cultures" andDrucilla Cornell's "Time, Deconstruction, and the Challenge toLegal Positivism A school of Jurisprudence whose advocates believe that the only legitimate sources of law are those written rules, regulations, and principles that have been expressly enacted, adopted, or recognized by a governmental entity or political institution, including administrative, " to Eugene D. Genovese's Critical LegalStudies as Radical Politics and World View" and Teresa L.Ebert's "Writing in the Political: Resistance[Post]Modernism") as an "ensemble of socialrelations...promoting a radical social critique" (14). The readeris, by such a process, presumed consciously produced by the text--as"a concrete moment of resistance.. a social critique and acollective indictment" (15). Richard Clark Sterne, in Dark Mirror: The Sense of Justice inModern European and American Literature (1994), conceives of thelanguages in law more philosophically, juxtaposing as alternatives thepolitical concept of law (realistic law with a positivistic pos��i��tiv��ism?n.1. Philosophya. A doctrine contending that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought.b. perspectivethat privileges the stronger) with presumptively pre��sump��tive?adj.1. Providing a reasonable basis for belief or acceptance.2. Founded on probability or presumption.pre��sump universal natural law(idealistic law whose strengths lie in its ethical purity). In a furtherrefinement, he draws the distinction as one between that which the lawadjudges naturally evil by community consensus and law that declares anact to be evil because it is so by statute. Sterne examines whetherjustice is not an orphan in a world which is basically chaotic andirrational and in which there appears to be no transcendent law whichanyone feels bound to obey. Is there, for example, any real possibilitythat a trial will render justice that can be regarded as ethica? Ishuman rationality too "weak and occasional for us to put anyreliance upon it" (252)? is good sense sufficient to create a goodsociety? By contrast, the prospect is raised that natural law could verywell come to mean whatever the individual in question desired toadvocate, John Hart Ely John Hart Ely (December 3 1938 - October 25 2003) is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in United States history, ranking just after Richard Posner, Ronald Dworkin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , as quoted in Sterne The guru of criticaljurisprudence, Robert Unger, expresses the dilemma in slightly differentterms: "Either the allegedly universal ends are too few andabstract to give content to the idea of the good, or they are toonumerous and concrete to be truly universal. One has to choose betweentriviality and implausibility" (as quoted in Sterne 257).Nevertheless, Sterne remains an advocate of the prospect for a justnatural law, finding in it the prospect for a justice of "fairness,equity, and reconciliation" (261). In an age in which socialconstructionism reigns supreme, Sterne makes the argument that naturallaw should not be abandoned for it stands for morality and values, thesense of a civilized society" (258). In Sterne's tracing ofsuch law, it has joined the laws of gods and humans (in Roman times)when in Greek and Christian times it had stood immortal and beyond humanreach. As Cicero expresses it, "Every human law has just so much ofthe nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature" (asquoted by Sterne 19). This higher "unwritten" law, regarded asimmutable IMMUTABLE. What cannot be removed, what is unchangeable. The laws of God being perfect, are immutable, but no human law can be so considered. , is yet imperfectly understood, and therefore applied, by man.And thus is positive law born, the law of humans unfettered by thetranscendent universals of a presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. rational moral order. For absentthe certain knowledge of timeless truth, how is one to recognize naturallaw for what it is, exclusive of how it has been socially and culturallyconstructed. As a counter to the purely arbitrary, the"natural" is, in the end and in spite of Sterne, as unnaturalas any other conceptualization con��cep��tu��al��ize?v. con��cep��tu��al��ized, con��cep��tu��al��iz��ing, con��cep��tu��al��iz��esv.tr.To form a concept or concepts of, and especially to interpret in a conceptual way: of law. Where, after all, is natural law@and the cache of rights it protects) rooted if not in the powerful, theestablished, the elite? What we finally arrive at in our examination of a range ofcontemporary interdisciplinary approaches emanating from law andliterature is a picture not so much of a convergence of knowledge oreven of eliminating differences; neither do we find we have redrawn thecultural map. But what we have done is discover a productiveboundary-blurring that has allowed a ghettoized discourse to ingestmaterial external to it to expand its "horizon ofexpectations" not only in terms of the texts now open to study butin terms of the tools with which they are studied. Moreover, we find anew appreciation for the notion of theory as a practice and practice asan indigenous theory, so that the two working back and forth force usnot only to challenge textual authority but to assume someresponsibility as readers and interpreters for creating it. In makingits own that which its outside it, law is indeed enriching the base fornew law that reaches out to other discourses, looking not only to itsown immediate pragmatic ends but to the larger issues of the sources andproduction of knowledges. If, indeed, one of law's aims (with all its interpretivetools) is to gain a firmer purchase on meaning, and if checking ourframes with reality is becoming increasingly less plausible as astrategy of interpretation, then a broader/deeper understanding of thecontribution language and literature make to the theory and practice oflaw is not a luxury but a necessity--in a critical sense fundamental tothe enterprise. We may choose, among others, a communication paradigm, ametaphor of representation, or a binary contest as our mode ofoperation, but choose we must if we wish to break out of insular ways ofregarding law to bring it back into the circle of human concerns in away that opens us to the challenges of consciously producing law andsubjects of law that are a better fit for the kind of humane society wewant to attain. What the interdisciplinarity of law, language, and literature maybest have taught us is that meaning is not just there to be discoveredor exhumed from the text (Leyh), but, rather, that it is an activerelational process. In some significant sense, it can no longer escapebeing regarded, as indeed the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin regardsit, as consisting in the narrative story that "makes" itspractices and by means of which interpretation happens as a socialpractice to make law as good as it can be in the terms posed by thesociety as a whole of which it is a part. 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