Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On the Origins and Prospects of the Humanistic Study of Law
- I PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCHOLARSHIP IN LAW AND THE HUMANITIES: THREE VIEWS
- II IDEAS OF JUSTICE
- III IMAGINING THE LAW
- IV LINGUISTIC, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL PROCESSES IN LAW
- 12 Language
- 13 Interpretation
- 14 Narrative and Rhetoric
- 15 Justice as Translation
- 16 The Constitution of History and Memory
- V INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES
- Index
- References
12 - Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On the Origins and Prospects of the Humanistic Study of Law
- I PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCHOLARSHIP IN LAW AND THE HUMANITIES: THREE VIEWS
- II IDEAS OF JUSTICE
- III IMAGINING THE LAW
- IV LINGUISTIC, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL PROCESSES IN LAW
- 12 Language
- 13 Interpretation
- 14 Narrative and Rhetoric
- 15 Justice as Translation
- 16 The Constitution of History and Memory
- V INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES
- Index
- References
Summary
As I began to write this chapter, the intersections of law and language, more or less insistently visible in my quotidian scholarly and teaching praxis, were brought sharply into focus. I had for a semester been working collaboratively with a faculty colleague and two students on a clinical legal education project, my first direct involvement in live client clinical rather than simulation-based skills training.
As the spring semester began, the event to which our work had been directed, an asylum application hearing, took place in an ICE “family shelter” in rural Pennsylvania, where the clients had been detained for some months. They were able to see each other, it is true, and the shelter was evidently preferable to the jails in which they could well have been held, but although they could spend their days together, they were housed at night in separate cells (or rooms or dormitories) for men on the one hand, and women and children on the other. This situation complicated what “family” might be thought to signify in context – the enabling of what I will call familial, if not domestic or sexual, intimacy. So too the term “shelter” was complicated by its rendering, in context, euphemistic: “[t]he Berks County facility, a former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is ‘less jail-like,’ [than the notorious Hutto family shelter in Texas].…[However, i]t is part of a larger juvenile facility housing U.S. citizens charged with or convicted of crimes.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Law and the HumanitiesAn Introduction, pp. 315 - 338Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009