Legal Writing as a Kind of Philosophy - Joel R. Cornwell

• Citation: Vol. 48 No. 3
• Publication year: 1997

Legal Writing as a Kind of Philosophy⁺by Joel R. Corn well^*

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein¹

Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations or, to put it somewhat less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment—the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status.

—Paul de Man²

I. Introduction

Post-structuralist theories of textual meaning have been integrated into legal education in various ways, notably through the influence of the

Critical Legal Studies movement.³ Ironically, legal writing courses, the portion of the first-year curriculum ostensibly allotted to techniques of dissecting and manipulating language, have largely ignored the insights of analytical philosophy and literary deconstruction indirectly appropri-ated in other courses. The standard models remain algorithmic, reinforcing a conservative view of writing as an applied lexigraphic skill, essentially void of the substance taught in nonwriting courses. This conceptual disjunction between writing and thought engenders and feeds the attitude that legal writing courses are ancillary to the rest of the law school curriculum, which teaches students to "think like a lawyer," as opposed to teaching mere techniques of transposing thoughts. Ironically, this attitude severely inhibits the mode of thinking to which it aspires. Only the realization that writing is thought empowers students to dismantle a legal text according to its own internal contradictions, and only prowess in dismantling provides the vision by which lawyers create arguments instead of ape them.

The first part of this Article examines why this stereotypical view of legal writing is perpetuated, identifying the reluctance to change as an instance of broader cultural and psychological prejudices delineated by Jacques Derrida and subsequent deconstructionist critics. Key to these is the notion of presence, which is analyzed in three manifestations, beginning with the most general (an illusion of the self within), proceeding to a more specific literary incarnation (an illusion of the meaning of a text), and ending with an aspect closely associated with legal education (an illusion of the answer behind Socratic questioning). Because the impossibility of a comprehensive account of language precludes any algorithmic formula for ethical decision-making, the IRAC model is undesirable, particularly if steps are not taken to demonstrate to the student that it is a model of conversational rhetoric as opposed to a model of logical calculus. Accordingly, the second part of this Article examines four approaches that aspire to such a demonstration. A third part of the Article briefly addresses the question of political agendas intruding into pedagogy and is essentially an attempt to allay fears that the aforementioned approaches necessarily entail some form of left wing ideology. The Article concludes with a summation and exhortation to a more open view of writing.

II. Law, Language, and Presence

Here is one way to look at law: law is a systematic representation of concepts. Rules of law are a means of signifying logical connections within an interactive network of ideas, and these connectors are subject to the dictates of formal logic. Thus, the application of a given rule is testable against a broader consistency of actual and potential applica-tions across a field of ideas represented by other rules. Ultimately, all rules are postulated from elemental premises that are scientifically verifiable, and so the study of law entails a scientific method. This is the proverbial seamless web, the ideational common law architecture undergirding the pedagogical formalism of Langdell.⁴ It is the theme varieted by natural law thinkers such as Aquinas⁵ and Blackstone.⁶ It is the tacit—and essentially unconscious—presupposition of judges and lawyers, past and present, standing in the tradition of Anglo-American common law. It is the foundation of the classic mode of teaching legal reasoning and legal writing. Law is a rational calculus of rules applied to facts. Predictive reasoning is a matter of computing ideas (in the form of rules) against spatio-temporal variables (in the form of facts) adjusted for perceptual irregularities of judicial mechanics (in the form of policy). Argumentation is, accordingly, an exercise of emphasizing certain fact-based variables against the compelling force of rules (asserted as a matter of formulaic acumen) viewed in light of political consequences that reinforce both the empirically driven emphasis upon the necessary variables and the logical compulsion of the rule. Legal writing, in either an objective or argumentative mode, is thus an algorithmic exercise of skill separate from the substance represented by legal rules and their ideational premises. So law is a kind of science.

Here is another way to look at law: law is a linguistic act that represents nothing. Rules of law are tropes facilitating good feeling by misrepresenting nothing as a series of compelling inferences in a scientific mode. These tropes, properly brought to conscious awareness, are revealed as part of a complex mistake by which humans posit a level of understanding outside of language acts, a level in which meaning is merely represented by language, and language can be dissected to reveal the meanings that are, or ought to be, common to all human understand-ings. Law, then, is both a manifestation of power and a linguistic rationalization. This is law as viewed by Nietzsche⁷ and Jerome Frank.⁸ (If it is not precisely the view shared by other so-called Legal Realists of the 1920s and 1930s, it is the inevitable result that their opponents feared.)⁹ This is law as viewed by adherents of Critical Legal Studies.¹⁰ This is, in the terms of literary deconstruction, law as nothing but text, law that cannot be read. Law is fiction turning inward to contradict its thematic elements and then to contradict its contradic-tions without end. Predictive reasoning resembles a form of literary criticism that casts a discerning eye to the influential bearing of texts on the entropic trajectories of judicial emotions. Argumentation is a matter of using tropes well. Legal writing is writing law. It can be nothing else because there is nothing for writing to represent, no substance for which skill is a mouthpiece. So law is a kind of writing.

Here is one way of looking at writing: writing is a way of describing that which exists independently of human design by translating perception into thought, thought into speech, and speech into representa-tional symbols. So writing is a kind of technical exercise in graphics, and it is nonsense to assert that law is a kind of writing: writing merely represents law. Here is another way to look at writing: writing is the interplay of images that we call thinking, a processing of data into symbols that compel other symbols. Thought presupposes imagery because there is otherwise nothing to think. Writing is not a conse-quence of speech that is a consequence of thought, but rather writing is a precondition of thought and speech. So writing is thought in its purest possible form—writing does not represent law, but makes it.

Which way of looking at law and writing is the true one? Here is one way of understanding truth: truth is the correspondence of representa-tions with actual states of affairs. According to this way of understand-ing, the operative question is one of verification: which way of looking at law and writing is the real way? So legal writing is a kind of calculus. Here is another way of understanding truth: truth is an emphatic designation that something is worthy of trust, or, as William James would have it, good in the way of belief.¹¹ According to this second way of understanding, the operative question is not one of verification, but of utility: which way of looking at law and writing will facilitate our sense of goodness, getting us from where we are to where we want to be?¹² So legal writing is a kind of philosophy.

What, then, is the meaning of a written text? Here is one way of defining meaning: the meaning of a word or phrase is its verification according to empirical fact or analytical truth. Here is another way of defining meaning: the meaning of a word or phrase is the sense that emerges from that which stands fast around it, giving it life in the form of context.¹³ Thus, the content of a word or phrase, or of a feeling engendered by words and phrases, is nothing more or less than other words, phrases, and feelings engendered by words and phrases. If one looks for meaning in the first way, one will find the meaning of a text, or one will find unverifiable nonsense. So meaning is a kind of fact. If one looks for meaning in the second way, one cannot confidently purport to find the meaning, but rather some meanings, and the ascription of nonsense must ever bear a tentative quality. For even chaos is a form of order to those with the eyes to see,¹⁴ and any perceived order bears within its strictures the inevitable destruction of its own hierarchy. So meaning is a kind of aspiration. To what is the aspiration directed? It is directed to other aspirations, in the form of words, phrases, and feelings—none of which is sharply distinguishable from the others. Hence, according to this view, law is a kind of writing, writing is a kind of philosophy, philosophy is a kind of aspiration, and aspiration is again a kind of writing.¹⁵ But why in the world...