Richard Dawson, Justice as Attunement: Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, Economics and the Rest of Life
In 1973 James Boyd White published The Legal Imagination. In retrospect, we can say that this was the moment when Law and Literature was born as a stream of consciousness addressing itself to the mind of the lawyer. In the fall of 2013, the event was celebrated with a special workshop at the meeting of an association of scholars devoting themselves to law and the humanities in London. Among the participants was the author of the book under consideration, Richard Dawson, a writer from New Zealand who had taken The Legal Imagination not only as a starting point of scholarly pursuits but as a fountain of wisdom. Justice as Attunement is one of the most intriguing and beautiful books about law I have read in a long time and a completely fitting tribute to White. The Legal Imagination itself is an unusual collection of materials, looking somewhat like the traditional casebook that American universities use to teach law. It is subtly different though in aiming to shape the practices of reading and discussion current among lawyers, in such a way as to make them deal better with the authoritative materials of the law and the people they are supposed to be serving. So the emphasis is not on understanding the coherence and complexity of a body of law, but on shaping a critical and self-critical attitude through reading and debating literary texts in conjunction with legal materials. A brilliant example is White’s collection of materials on how the law talks about people. He begins with a selection of passages from novels (Dickens, Tolstoy) where the character of people is evoked, confronting the rich ways this is done with the reduced way the law talks about people in a language of labels (such as in the insanity defense) or judges them without labels (in sentencing a person) where the question is how this can be done. He then moves towards the issue of the language of race and how the law deals with social labels, bringing in all kinds of materials on slavery (political speeches by Lincoln, reports from observers, memoirs written by former slaves, decisions by judges). There are assignments to set the student to work and brief reflections from the teacher himself. It is an open work, in that it urges the reader to take the materials seriously but come to their own conclusions. Dawson turns the method White developed in The Legal Imagination to the legal imagination at work in White’s own writings on law and justice. In White’s footsteps, he wants to practice an art of intense and attentive reading that may transform readers like himself during the process. ‘In brief, the activity is: constituting ourselves and others when we use our language, which we transform in our use of