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INTRODUCTION
The occasion of the following interview was the Montesquieu Lecture at the University of Tilburg, which Professor James Boyd White delivered in February 2006.1 In the lecture, entitled "When Language Meets the Mind," Professor White discussed the manner of interpreting and criticizing texts, both in the law and in other fields, that he has worked out over his career.
The heart of this method, as described in the lecture, is to direct attention to three sets of questions:
* What is the language in which this text is written, and the culture of which it is a part? How are we to evaluate these things?
* What relation does this writer or speaker establish with this language as he uses it-does he just replicate it unthinkingly, or does he make it the object of critical attention or transformation? How are we to evaluate what he does?
* What relation does the writer or speaker establish with those to whom and about whom he speaks? How are we to evaluate these relations?
To ask these questions in a serious way invites one into a complex mode of thought: thought at once anthropological and linguistic, as it examines a culture and its language; at once literary and psychological, as it examines ways of simultaneously employing the resources and resisting the limitations of one's cultural inheritance; at once ethical and political, as it examines the identities, the relations, and the communities we create and dissolve and recreate as we speak or write. The method is both descriptive and normative, and it treats both law and other forms of thought and speech. It underlies Professor White's writing and teaching alike.
Jeanne Gaakeer, the interviewer (as well as a contributor to this tribute to Professor White), has long been interested in the relation between law and the humanities, having written her doctoral dissertation on the subject and having published a book on law and literature, with particular attention to the work of Professor White, entitled Hope Springs Eternal.
The work of which this lecture is an example is inherently interdisciplinary, making use throughout of humanistic and literary texts to help us understand the nature of legal thought and expression. As early as 1965, in a review of Myron...