A study of the ways in which lawyers think and speak. We explore the limits and resources of traditional forms of legal thought and expression both directly and by extensive comparison with passages drawn from other fields, including poetry, fiction, drama, and history. The premise of the course is that the law can be regarded as an imaginative and literary activity that yields the sorts of pleasures and significance, and makes the sorts of demands, that other important writing does. Our subject is the art by which the possibilities of legal thought and speech can be enhanced or expanded. Specific topics with respect to which these interests are pursued include: the rhetoric of the death penalty; the intellectual implications of the statutory form; the ways in which the law talks about human character; the use of racial language and the law; the implications of the use of the rule as an instrument for the organization of social relations and as a device for arriving at and explicating judgments; the criticism of judicial opinion; and rather extended comparisons between the sorts of writing the lawyer does and the writing of poets and historians. Frequent papers are assigned. Readings: White, The Legal Imagination; White, Heracles’ Bow; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Euripides, Alcestis; and Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.