The Word and the Law

Authors

• James B. White, University of Michigan

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

The Word and the Law is an extraordinary combination of law, personal statement, literary criticism, and theology. In a sense its central question is whether it is possible to have a life in the law that is good, and the answer is yes-yes, though not at all easy. I have often suggested it as reading to students who are worried about the profession they have chosen, and they frequently return to me with deep thanks for the introduction. Milner's commitment throughout is not to abstraction or theory or generalization, but to particular realities. Partly for this reason he begins the book with a series of vignettes -in a better world they might have been profiles in The New Yorker magazine-of people working in and through the law in ways that seem to Milner fundamentally good. But the word "good" hardly does it; it would be better to say that he sees these people as expressing, acting out of, and making real what he calls "the Word," a complex term that is central to his theological thinking and about which I will say a little below. The people about whom Milner writes in the first section of The Word and the Law include a man working ceaselessly to end capital punishment; the founder of a legal services office in Eastern Kentucky; a woman who works as a judge in a New York City housing court; a man, based in Oregon, who serves as tribal judge in several Native American tribes; the head of the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington, D.C.;' the Director of the clinical program at Yale, who teaches law students how to represent the dispossessed; and his partner in life, who works on the problems of homelessness in New Haven.

Recommended Citation

White, James B. (2007) "The Word and the Law," Georgia Law Review: Vol. 41: No. 3, Article 14.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/glr/vol41/iss3/14