Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
1983
Abstract
The subject of this essay is legal literacy, but to put it that way requires immediate clarification for that phrase has a wide range of possible meanings. At one end of its spectrum of significance, for example, legal literacy means fuU competence in legal discourse, both as reader and as writer. This kind of literacy is the object of a professional education, and it requires not only a period of formal schooling but years of practice as well. Indeed, as with other real languages, the ideal of perfect competence in legal language can never be attained: practitioners are always learning about their language and about the world, they are in a sense always remaking both, and these processes never come to an end. What this sort of professional literacy entails and how it is to be talked about are matters of interest to lawyers and law teachers, but this meaning of legal literacy will not be discussed here. At the other end of the spectrum of legal literacy are people who recognize legal words and locutions as foreign to themselves, as part of the world of the law. A person who is literate in this sense knows that there is a world of language and action called "law," but little more about it: certainly not enough to have any real access to it.
Between these extremes is another possible meaning of legal literacy: the degree of competence in legal discourse that is required for meaningful and active life in our increasingly legalistic and litigious culture. Citizens who are ideally literate in this sense are not expected to know how to draft deeds and wills or to try cases or to manage the bureaucratic maze, but they do know when and how to call upon the specialists who can do these things. More important, they are able to protect and advance their own interests: for example in dealing with a landlord or a tenant or in their interactions with the police, with the zoning commission, or with the Social Security Administration. People with this type of literacy are able not only to follow but to evaluate news reports and periodical literature dealing with legal matters-from Supreme Court decisions to House Committee reports. They know how to function effectively in positions of responsibility and leadership (say as an elected member of a school board or as chair of a neighborhood association or as a member of a zoning board or police commission). This sense of the term legal literacy embodies the ideal of a fully competent and engaged citizen, and that ideal is a wholly proper one to keep before us.
Publication Information & Recommended Citation
White, James Boyd. "The Invisible Discourse of the Law: Reflections on Legal Literacy and General Education." In Literacy for Life: The Demand for Reading and Writing, edited by Richard W Bailey and Robin M Fosheim. New York: Modern Language Assoc. of America, 1983.