But if one’s life is one writing – and I really think it is – then the evolution, articulation of that writing has to be capable of incorporating change, growth, even contradiction.
-Ron Silliman

Which is why, perhaps, this searching for a link between law and poetry feels a bit forced. The only link, and the ultimate link, is that my life is a writing life. Wherever I am, and whatever I do, all my experience is a poetic encounter.

This tumult's meant to tilt
All grammar.

-Lisa Robertson, XEclogue

The plaintiff, labouring on behalf of the defendant to obtain pardon from the King for felonious murder, did not receive 100 pounds promised. The plaintiff did nothing to obtain pardon, but merely rode back and forth between London, Roiston and Newmarket.
(Lampleigh v. Brathwait)

I've learned after my first legal writing assignment that "lawyers do not like long sentences" and that I should remove all semi-colons. It's true that short sentences are the norm in most technical writing. But I'm reluctant to give up the semi-colon. It's the most difficult punctuation mark to master, and I like to practice using it. The semi-colon conveys so much subtlety in the rhetorical balancing of tension and resolution; flat declaration seems so blunt.

the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
-Tom Waits

All you ever need to know about contract law. And you knew that already, I'm sure.

Much great literature...achieves an equipoise, rather than a resolution, of opposing forces. ... Statutes may be ambivalent too, through failure of foresight or pressure to compromise. But when a statute is drawn into litigation, the court must adopt a reading that will favour one side of the lawsuit or the other. It cannot revel in statutory ambivalence.
-Richard Posner, Law and Literature

A dread feeling, linked with time, becomes the experience of [quote] the quotidian [endquote], so I'm a fragment reading back to see when I was a whole.
-Jeff Derksen, Dwell

The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour, and the lawyer's question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply.
-Lord Atkin, Donoghue v. Stevenson

The spectre of hopeless indeterminacy, of rampant subjectivity, hovers over the key texts of both fields. (legal documents and imaginative literature)
-Richard Posner, Law and Literature

Both law and poetry are social discourses. While law "brings order into the chaos of social interactions," poetry frustrates direct social interactions, diverting the social into the textual. Law provides structure (scaffolding) for defining relationships. Poetry provides an intermediary, creating communities that define themselves around texts. Writers and readers interact through writing and through the social acts of performance and criticism. Community implies some method of legal organization. What is the legal organization of a poetry community?

Central to law (at least to private law, i.e. contracts, real property) is the binary of action. Every (trans)action implies an actor and an acted upon. Every offer implicates an offeror and an offeree; every lease a lessor and a lessee.

Cringe at the inelegance, and I do, but it works to differentiate between the subtleties of action, reaction and consequence that make up the details of legal analysis.

What about the transaction between writer and reader? Writers have no writees; they have ideal readers, which are fictions. Readers don't have readees; they read the text, not the person beyond the text.

Writer and reader are necessarily separate; no action binds them together. Transaction takes place between writer and text, and between reader and text.

The law charts relationships between actors in transactions. Poetry charts relationships that lead only to itself.

Literature studies is the most radical of the "law and" courses because it brings the artists into the law school, always a dangerous, if exciting, activity.
-C.R.B. Dunlop

Why such a stringent division between law and art that bringing the two together is "radical" and "dangerous"? When I was deciding whether to start law school, I talked to a career counselor who told me that female lawyers who are satisfied in their career choices tend to have a high interest in the arts (on the Strong Interest Inventory test). When I took the test, my interests were only in the arts (not necessarily healthy, but probably only indicative of my anxiety over taking the test to begin with) -- and yet, I'm fascinated by the study of law. I'm not sure yet how to articulate the the overlaps between legal discourse and methodology and the discourses and methodologies of art (specifically writing), but I'm sure that law and art, like science and art, have more in common than is generally recognized.

One must of course learn the rules of grammar and the meaning of terms, but to know those things is not to know how to speak the language. That knowledge comes only with use. The real difficulties and pleasures lie, not in knowing the rules of French or of law, but in knowing how to speak the language, how to make sense of it, how to use it to serve your purposes in life.
-James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination

Is law a language? Is poetry a language? Or are both methods of apprehending experience through language? Are poetry and law each discourses? Is law public and poetry private? Law authoritative and poetry subversive?

The attraction that certain minds feel for the law and the absurdity of its workings. Gide, Dostoyevski, Balzac, Kafka, Malraux, Melville, etc. Try to find out why.
-Albert Camus, Carnets

You are a ubiquity beyond my minority.
-Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary

Training for subservience is learning for domination as well.
-Duncan Kennedy

Of the things that bother me about law: the hierarchy, the conformity, the power. "Passing," then becoming, then propogating.

To plead for complete uniformity may be to cry for the moon.
-Lord Wilberforce

Lawyers can argue as to whether the case law governing liability for bad behaviour of one's dogs should govern liability for the independent torts of one's cats.
-(source?)

I can't remember where I read this, but it has something to do with distinguishing cases based on differences in facts. Presumably a decision against a negligent dog wouldn't be necessarily binding on an action against a negligent cat.

The lawyers know too much.

But what do the lawyers know? The lawyers know language: how to slip into it and argue around and through it, how to chisel into words and wrench them open. The lawyers work inside a fictional text; they work with the words that form us. All our rights and obligations, all our freedoms and limits are worded, and the lawyers wield the words.