Miller on French Fries Are Meat: The Legal Poetics of Getting From Law To Justice

Jeffrey Miller has published French Fries Are Meat: The Legal Poetics of Getting from Law to Justice. Here is the abstract.

A summary way of describing the present essay is an analysis of linguistic metaphysics in law. It considers legal operations that make a juristic “something” out of relatively thin air – an undertaking, a trust, a dismissal, a warranty, even reasonableness – in a more or less supernatural iteration but with mundane and practical consequences. More pointedly, it considers how law regularly uses abstract or even poetic language to attempt to work justice, how certain, notionally poetic, forms of legalese – fictions, constructions, deemings, presumptions, etc. – comprise a branch of equity, a systematic effort to ease the rigor of black letter law, to render it more humane or “more moral.” I examine how litigants, lawyers, judges, and legislators remake our societies through The Word, shaping law in the cause of renovation and sometimes redemption. I also consider how such poetics can serve the improper purpose of judicial legislating or politics.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.