This book outlines and evaluates the principal strands of critical legal studies, and achieves much more as well.

The author, in this series of essays, depicts the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. The topics discussed include a talk to students entering law school, describing the intellectual activity of the law, an exploration of the structure of legal thought and expression, and a dialogue which explores the ethics of argument.

In this book, one of our country's most distinguished scholar-judges shares with us his vision of the law.

Law is understood, interpreted, and practiced by metaphor. The presently dominant, conceptual metaphor for law is that "law is the bulwark of freedom." Milner S. Ball, in this experimental statement, invites the reader to consider an alternate metaphor: "law is a medium of human solidarity." A more humane metaphor for law, Ball's alternative connotes an open-ended conductor allowing for exchange and flow rather than the defensive wall or barrier associated with "bulwark." To discover how this alternate metaphor may take concrete (...) form, Ball explores the law of the sea and coast while basing his discussion in broad theological terms. This provocative analysis of jurisprudence will interest academic and practicing lawyers, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists concerned with legal studies. Law as bulwark suggests a static, defensive posture that is all divisions and boundaries--a contradiction to the meaning and purpose of law as well as destructive of human community. Law as medium, illuminated by Ball's analysis of international, federal, and state marine law, releases these barriers and promotes a flow of dialogue. When viewed in this way, law serves the dynamics of a transfigured society. The metaphorical context of law as bulwark, depicted by Ball, is "Fortress America"; the metaphorical context of law as medium is the "Peaceable Kingdom." Ball examines the possibilities and practice of law as the medium of the "Peaceable Kingdom" through a theological perspective based on a nonreligious, political theology of the natural. The author also draws imaginatively upon ecology, physics, art, literature, ethics, and rhetoric to persuade the reader to join him in his hope for a jurisprudence more authentically human and less inherently victimizing than that of the legal system today. (shrink)