Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T10:20:44.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Is There Any Backbone in This Fish? Interpretive Communities, Social Criticism, and Transgressive Legal Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

This article examines the social conditions of lawyers' moral agency, through the focus of the work of Stanley Fish. A central concept in Fish's work, and one relevant to understanding the nature of professional groups, is that of interpretive communities. This notion is examined to reveal its sociological as well as philosophical assumptions, and their implications for legal practice. The article takes issue with Fish's stance on the value of theory for practice and challenges the notion of discreteness of interpretive communities inherent in Fish's position. It argues that the resources for criticism within professional groups are more numerous and powerful than Fish allows. Taking two cases studies, it attempts to demonstrate the transgressive nature of some legal practices. In the final section, redefining the law school's community and interdisciplinary scholarship are suggested as devices for escaping Fish's “net.” A critical hermeneutics of legal practice is argued for.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Abel, Richard. 1989. American Lawyers. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Atkinson, Rob. 1995. How the Butler Was Made to Do It: The Perverted Professionalism of The Remains of the Day. Yale Law Journal 105:177220.Google Scholar
Ulrich, Beck, Giddens, Anthony, and Lash, Scott, eds. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modem Social Order. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bledstein, Burton. 1976. The Culture of Professionalism. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Blumberg, Abraham. 1967. The Practice of Law as a Confidence Game: Organizational Cooptation of a Profession. Law and Society Review 1:1539.Google Scholar
Brennan, Frank. 1995. One Land , One Nation: Mabo-Towards 2001. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Brint, M., and Winter, W., eds. 1991. Pragmatism in Law and Society. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Cain, Maureen. 1979. The General Practice Lawyer and the Client: Towards a Radical Conception. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 7:331–54.Google Scholar
Cain, Maureen. 1994. The Symbol Traders. In Cain and Harrington 1994.Google Scholar
Cain, Maureen and Harrington, Christine, eds. 1994. Lawyers in a Postmodern World: Translation and Transgression. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Cooray, L. J. Mark 1994. The High Court in Mabo. In Groot and Rowse 1994.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla. 1992. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cornell, Drucilla. Rosenfeld, Michel, and Carson, David Gray, eds. 1992. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Croft, Colin. 1992. Reconceptualizing American Legal Professionalism: A Proposal for Deliberative Moral Community. New York University Law Review 67:12561353.Google Scholar
Dasenbrock, Reed. 1986. Accounting for Changing Certainties of Interpretive Communities. Modern Language Notes 101:1022–41.Google Scholar
Dasenbrock, Reed, ed. 1993. Literary Theory after Davidson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Margaret. 1996. Delimiting the Law: “Postmodernism” and the Politics of Law. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Dawson, Brettel T., ed. 1993. Women, Law and Social Change: Core Readings and Current Issues. 2d ed. North York: Captus Press.Google Scholar
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Diggins, John Patrick. 1994. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile. 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. Oxford: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Laws Empire. London: Faber.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1991. Pragmatism, Right Answers and True Banality. In Brint and Winter 1991.Google Scholar
Edwards, Harry. 1992. The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession. Michigan Law Review 91:3478.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. 1965. Middlemarch. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Ericson, Richard, and Baranek, Pat. 1981. Reproducing Order. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Erikson, Kai. 1966. Wayward Puritans. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Faine, Jon. 1993. Lawyers in the Alice: Aboriginals and Whitefellas Law. Sydney: Federation Press.Google Scholar
Fairlamb, Horace. 1994 Critical Conditions: Postmodernity and the Question of Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1989. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1991a. Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin. In Brint and Winter 1991.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1991b. The Law Wishes to Have a Formal Existence. In The Fate of Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, 159208. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1992. Play of Surfaces: Theory and the Law. In Legal Hermeneutics: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Gregory Leyh, 297316. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1994. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1995. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fiss, Owen. 1985. Conventionalism. California Law Review 58:177–97.Google Scholar
Fletcher, George P. 1993. Loyalty. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Freadman, Richard, and Miller, Seamus. 1992. Rethinking Theory: A Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and an Alternative Account. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Friedson, Eliot. 1994. Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gabel, Peter, and Harris, Paul. 1983. Building Power and Breaking Images: Critical Legal Theory and the Practice of Law. New York Review of Law and Social Change 11:369411.Google Scholar
Andrew, Goldsmith, ed. 1991. Complaints against the Police: The Trend to External Review. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Andrew, Goldsmith, ed. 1993. An Unruly Conjunction? Social Thought and Legal Action in Clinical Legal Education. Journal of Legal Education 43:415–53.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert. 1988. The Independence of Lawyers. Boston University Law Review 68:183.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert and Simon, William. 1992. The Redemption of Professionalism? In Lawyers' Ideals/Lawyers' Practices: Transformations in the American Legal Profession, ed. Robert Nelson, David Trubek, and Rayman Solomon, 230–57. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Granfield, Robert. 1992. Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Groot, Murray, and Rowse, Tim. 1994. Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo. Sydney: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Gunn, Giles. 1992. Thinking across the American Gram: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Harrington, Christine. 1994. Outlining a Theory of Legal Practice. In Cain and Harrington 1994, 4969.Google Scholar
Haskell, Thomas. 1996. Justifying the Rights of Academic Freedom in the Era of “Power/ Knowledge.” In Legal Rights: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Herman, Didi. 1994. Rights of Passage: Struggles for Lesbian and Gay Legal Equality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1995. On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Hunter, Ian. 1994. Native Title: Acts of State and the Rule of Law. In Groot and Rowse 1994, 97109.Google Scholar
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1989. The Remains of the Day. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Richard, and Le Brun, Marlene. 1995. The Quiet Revolution. Sydney: Federation Press.Google Scholar
Kagan, Robert, and Rosen, Robert. 1985. On the Social Significance of Large Law Firm Practice. Stanford Law Review 37:399464.Google Scholar
Kelly, Michael, ed. 1990. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 1982. Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy. In The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. David Kairys, 4061. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Kronman, Anthony. 1993. The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas. 1981. A Function for Thought Experiments. In Scientific Revolutions, ed. Lan Hacking. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kupfer, Susan. 1996. Authentic Legal Practices. Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 10:33113.Google Scholar
Lash, Scott. 1994 Reflexivity and Its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community. In Beck, et al. 1994.Google Scholar
Leonard, Stephen. 1990. Critical Theory in Political Practice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Levi, Edward. 1969. Point of View: Talks on Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lopez, Gerald. 1992. Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicanos Vision of Progressive Legal Practice. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Luban, David. 1986. Fish v. Fish, or Some Realism about Idealism. Cardozo Law Review 7:693711.Google Scholar
Lumb, R. D. 1993. The Mabo Case-Public Law Aspects. In Stephenson and Ratnapala 1993, 123.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart. 1963. Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study. American Sociological Review 28:5567.Google Scholar
McBarnet, Doreen. 1994. Legal Creativity: Law, Capital and Legal Avoidance. In Cain and Harrington, 7384.Google Scholar
McDonald, Keith. 1995. The Sociology of the Professions. London: Sage.Google Scholar
McKinnon, Catherine. 1991. Reflections on Sex Equality under Law. Yale. Law Journal 100:12811328.Google Scholar
Mahoney, Kathleen. 1992. The Constitutional Law of Equality in Canada. Maine Law Review 44:229–59.Google Scholar
Mann, Kenneth. 1985. Defending White Collar Crime. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1947. The Machine, the Worker, and the Engineer. Science 105:7984.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth. 1994 Legal Loci and Places in the Heart: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies. Symposium. Law and Society Review 28:971–92.Google Scholar
Moens, Gabriel. 1993. Mabo and Political Policy-Making by the High Court. In Stephenson and Ratnapala 1993, 4862.Google Scholar
Mollen, Milton. 1994 Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department. City of New York, 7 July.Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher. 1990. Right You Are (If You Think So): Stanley Fish and the Rhetoric of Assent. Comparative Literature 42:144–82.Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher. 1992. Baudrillard and the War That Never Happened. Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Google Scholar
Posner, Richard. 1988. Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Posner, Richard. 1990. The Problems of Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Razack, Sherene. 19901991. Speaking for Ourselves: Feminist Jurisprudence and Minority Women. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 4:440–58.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Henry. 1987a. Frontier. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Henry. 1987b. The Law of the Land. Ringwood, Australia: Penguin.Google Scholar
Rhode, Deborah, and Luban, David. 1992. Legal Ethics. Boston: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Ritter, David. 1996. The “Rejection” of “Terra Nullius” in Mabo: A Critical Analysis. Sydney Law Review 18:533.Google Scholar
Roper, Christopher. [1994]. Survey of Australian Law Graduates. Sydney: Centre for Legal Education.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Gerald. 1991. The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Michel. 1992. Deconstruction and Legal Interpretation: Conflict, Indeterminacy and the Temptations of the New Legal Formalism. In Cornell, et al. 1992, 152210.Google Scholar
Rowse, Tim. 1993. After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1982. Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community. In The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Sanders, Will, ed. 1994. Mabo and Native Title: Origins and Institutional Implications, Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, and Felstiner, William. 1995. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients: Power and Meaning in the Legal Process. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkin, Jeremy. 1995. The Role of the Legal Profession in the Promotion and Advancement of a Human Rights Culture. Commonwealth Law Bulletin 21:1306–13.Google Scholar
Scales, Ann. 1994. Avoiding Constitutional Depression: Bad Attitudes and the Fate of Butler. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 7:349–92.Google Scholar
Schelly, Judith. 1985. Interpretation in Law: The Dworkin-Fish Debate (or Soccer amongst the Gahuku-Gama). California Law Review 73:158–80.Google Scholar
Schlag, Pierre. 1987. Fish v Zapp: The Case of the Relatively Autonomous Self. Georgetown Law Journal 76:3758.Google Scholar
Schlegel, John. 1984 Searching for Archimedes: Legal Education, Legal Scholarship, and Liberal Ideology. Journal of Legal Education 34:103–10.Google Scholar
Scholes, Robert. 1985. Textual Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Schon, Donald. 1988. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Schon, Donald. 1989. The Crisis of Professional Knowledge and the Pursuit of an Epistemology of Practice. In Teaching and the Case Method, ed. C. Roland Christensen. Boston: Harvard Business School.Google Scholar
Selznick, Philip. 1992. The Moral Commonwealth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shaffer, Thomas L. 1987. Faith and the Professions. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University.Google Scholar
Sharp, Naomi. 1996. No Ordinary Judgment: Mabo, the Murray Islanders Land Case, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.Google Scholar
Sheehy, Elizabeth. 1991. Feminist Argumentation before the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Seboyer; R v Gayme: The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Melbourne University Law Review 18:450–68.Google Scholar
Simon, William. 1978. The Ideology of Advocacy: Procedural Justice and Professional Ethics. Wisconsin Law Review 29:30144.Google Scholar
Simpson, Gerry. 1993. Mabo, International Law, Terra Nullius, and the Stories of Settlement: An Unresolved Jurisprudence. Melbourne University Law Review 19:195210.Google Scholar
Smiley, Marion. 1992. Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Power and Accountability from a Pragmatic Point of View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Bruce James. 1985. Politics and Remembrance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stephenson, M. A., and Ratnapala, S., eds. 1993. Mabo: A Judicial Revolution. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Symposium, . 1992. Theoretics of Practice: The Integration of Progressive Thought and Action. Hastings Law Journal 43:7171257.Google Scholar
Symposium, . 1993. Legal Education. Michigan Law Review 91:19212219.Google Scholar
Thomas, Brook. 1991. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Twining, William. 1994. Blackstones Tower. London: Sweet and Maxwell.Google Scholar
Twining, William. 1995. What Are Law Schools for Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 46:291303.Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto. 1986. The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1987. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1989. The Company of Critics. London: Peter Haliban.Google Scholar
Webber, Jeremy. 1995. The Jurisprudence of Regret: The Search for Standards of Justice in Mabo. Sydney Law Review 17:528.Google Scholar
Weber, Samuel. 1987. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Richard. 1992. Poethics and Other Law Strategies of Law and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
West, Robin. 1987. Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Doubts about the Law as Literature Movement. Tennessee Law Review 54:203–78. (Reprinted in West 1993).Google Scholar
West, Robin. 1993. Narrative, Authority, and Law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Will, George. 1996. Hoax Reveals an Academic Arrogance. Australian Financial Review, 3 June.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Alan. 1992. Algorithmic Justice. In Cornell, et al. 1992.Google Scholar
Yeatman, Anna. 1994. Postmodern Revisionings of the Political. London: Routledge.Google Scholar