Abstract

Three recent books—Richard Posner's Law and Literature, Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, and James Boyd White's Justice as Translation— struggle over the relationship of law and literature. Fish and White defend the relevance of literature to law; Posner tries to kill the nascent law and literature movement by hugging it to death. Posner's literary criticism is belles‐lettristic, concerned chiefly with how “great” a work is. Fish's is social, emphasizing the interpretative community. White attempts to make a new community, in which we come to understand one another by an effort of translation. White's vision is attractive, though it surrenders Science to non‐translation. As the sage said, even in science it is translation, and rhetoric, all the way down.