Speech, silence, and ethical lives in the law.

• Author: West, Robin

As his many appreciative readers know, James Boyd White brought his learning to bear on the relation between ethical living and ethical speaking, and particularly as it pertains to how we live and speak in law. His prodigious writing, teaching, and speaking career, as far as I can tell, was motivated by a singular, passionate belief: that the human capacity for language can and should serve as a bridge from mind to mind and spirit to spirit, so that we might cohabit the earth not only peaceably, but with the pleasures and grace of each other's company. Language, White taught, can both facilitate friendship across the space that divides us as individuals, and create a just and lively cooperation across the oceans that divide our nations, our beliefs, and our communal codes for living. Ethical speech in law, White argued across the span of four decades, can address injustice, forge bonds of shared struggle, unearth a shared human essence across difference, ease suffering, create a human community, and articulate both our promises to each other and our hopes that we can live up to them.

In his books, his essays, his lectures, and no doubt in his day-to-day teaching, James White interpreted and taught from exemplary instances of profoundly ethical speech: Socrates' reflections on the meaning and value of citizenship the night before his beloved City-State put him to death, Huck Finn's casual embrace of friendship as he defied the institutionalized enmities of slavery, Nelson Mandela's Oration from the Dock on the subject of liberation as he anticipated his sentencing, Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, on the awesome destructiveness of both a necessary war and an unjust peace in a national family, Justice O'Connor's opinion on the communal value of shared precedent to a community of diverse individuals while striking down a divisive law. These men, women, and children's oratory soared, but all lawyers, White taught us, could and should engage in ethical speech. Lawyers distinctively employ speech as they live out their professional and ethical lives, and with their speech they create civic space for others to do likewise. They should, then, speak ethically. Jim White has been the guide, as his readers and students strive to learn how; Huck Finn, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and Socrates are the teachers. Lawyers could do a lot worse than to follow Jim White's eloquent, learned lead through the ethical monuments in our cultural heritage. Jim White loves law and he loves literature and he loves oratory, and he loves them for the moral breakthroughs that at least on occasion this exemplary speech facilitates.

I wonder, then, if it was with some sadness that...