Legal Affinities

It's never too early to pre-order Legal Affinities: Explorations in the Legal Form of Thought, a volume (which I co-edited with Jeff Powell and Jack Sammons) that explores and celebrates the pathbreaking work of Joseph Vining, the Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law emeritus at the University of Michigan Law School.  I do not know of a better phenomenology of law than the one Vining has offered us, and that's just the beginning of what the book's chapters cover.  There are chapters by (among others) MOJ-friend Steve Smith, Judge Noonan, Jeff Powell, Jack Sammons, and James Boyd White.  Check it out.

This is from the book's jacket:

"This book is about what makes law possible. A stranger to contemporary legal practice might think such a book unnecessary, but the eight authors of this book share the view that what makes law possible is under siege today. The authors also share the hope that by exploring how law is a humanistic practice that involves whole persons, the siege will be reversed. The pathbreaking work of University of Michigan Law professor Joseph Vining provides the authors' focus for their varied analyses of how law works not through force but, instead, through affinity.

"Vining's four books and other writings, spanning four decades, reveal the hidden connections by which men and women freely create and sustain a world of meaning through the phenomena we associate with law. Drawing on legal philosophy, theology, musicology, and other humanistic disciplines, the authors join Vining in discovering how law is, as Vining has written, ''evidence of view and belief far stronger than academic statement or introspection can provide.'' Law as Vining and the other authors reveal it is evidence of our better selves, not of the totalizing and brutalizing selves humans are capable of becoming, sometimes even under cover of law."