Rights and Rites: Initiation, Language and Performance in Law and Legal Education

Jonathan Yovel’s article, Rights and Rites: Initiation, Language and Performancein Law and Legal Education, represents a sophisticated examination of the role language plays in legal education and law more generally. In doing so, Yovel draws upon a wealth of resources, including perhaps most centrally, traditions emerging from the philosophy of language and critical linguistics. Yovel argues that law school education fosters a complex orientation toward language, which involves the active cultivation of a “rhetoric through representation.” An important observation made in this discussion is the fact that language does more than operate on the semantico-referential realm, but rather, serves as a crucial mechanism of performance. Yovel’s central argument is that paradigms of language in law and legal education reflect aspects of language’s multifunctionality (i.e., the performative, the rhetorical, and the referential). Rejecting an analysis that would concentrate exclusively on the meaning of linguistic acts, Yovel instead exposes the multifunctionality of language, demonstrating how speech acts depend upon the contexts of their production for meaning to be generated. In exploring this “performative paradigm,” Yovel highlights the ideas we have about language, its properties, and its intersection with moral agents and actors within the world. As such, the article offers a powerful critique of the way in which often unrecognized ideas about language inform much of legal pedagogy and legal practice. Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. Seamus Heaney, Lightenings