Narratives of Enlightenment 127

themselves as they seek to determine the“right” and the“wrong” conclusions. I am thinking instead of a more craft-based standard of evaluation, that which James Boyd White , one of the leading lights of the Law and Literature movement, calls“the criticism of the judicial opinion.”'® White contends that it is possible to judge an opinion favorably as literature— that is, to rank it as an exemplar of the genre— even if one disagrees with its result or ruling. This is because an opinion is essentially a performance, a realization of the art form of judicial writing, and like all art forms it is to be evaluated according to the standards of excellence that characterize its particular craft. White defines that quality of excellence as a matter

of judicial“character”:'"'

The ideal would be a judge who put his or her fundamental attitudes and methods to the test of sincere engagement with arguments the other way. We could ask, does this judge see the case before him as the occasion for printing out an ideology, for displaying technical skill, or as presenting a real difficulty, calling for real thought? The ideal judge would show that he had listened to the side he voted against and that he felt the pull of the argument both ways... In this sense, the judge’s most important work is the definition of his own voice, the character he makes for himself as he works through a case.

We cannot understand a poem or another piece of literary writing by paraphrasing reducing it to its“main idea”; we must inquire as to how the idea“is given meaning by the text” and to how the reader experiences“the life of the text itself.” Just 50, if law“is a way of creating a rhetorical community over time,” if“it works by establishing roles and relations and voices, positions from which one may speak, and giving us as speakers the materials and methods of