Life-Giving Speech Amid an Empire of Silence

It will come as no surprise to readers of the Law Review that James Boyd White is a daring and wise practitioner of what Clifford Geertz terms "blurred genres." By appeal to Kenneth Burke, Victor Turner, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, Geertz envisions a broad interpretive venture that breaks out of the rigid regulations of a particular discipline to a larger constructive enterprise that entertains life and its meaning as a "game" of face-to-face engagement, or as a "drama" that presses on to the next scene. White's work fits that vision precisely.