In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension of modern culture. They present lawyers as literary innovators, who creatively interpret legal authority, narrate disputed facts and hypothetical fictions, represent persons before the law, move audiences with artful rhetoric, and invent new legal forms and concepts. Binder and Weisberg explain the literary theories and methods increasingly applied to law, and they introduce and synthesize the work of over a hundred authors in the fields of law, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. Drawing on these disparate bodies of scholarship, Binder and Weisberg analyze law as interpretation, narration, rhetoric, language, and culture, placing each of these approaches within the history of literary and legal thought. They sort the styles of analysis most likely to sharpen critical understanding from those that risk self-indulgent sentimentalism or sterile skepticism, and they endorse a broadly synthetic cultural criticism that views law as an arena for composing and contesting identity, status, and character. Such a cultural criticism would evaluate law not simply as a device for realizing rights and interests but also as the framework for a vibrant cultural life.

This book addresses why just about everything that we experience on Earth depends upon the ocean circulation, the movement of the ocean water. Intended for a general lay-person audience, or as a non-science major undergraduate text, the book explains (in a non-mathematical manner) how the ocean circulation and the ocean’s interactions with the atmosphere provides the basic underpinnings for global climate and ecology. It then launches into more specific topics of societal relevance (e.g., how the coastal ocean and estuaries work, sea level variations, ocean waves and extreme tsunamis, hurricane storm surge and wave damage, how ocean temperatures change seasonally, harmful algal blooms, alternative energy potential and fish recruitment). Whereas some of these applications have a Florida, USA emphasis, all of them are equally applicable to coastal regions elsewhere.

In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension of modern culture. They present lawyers as literary innovators, who creatively interpret legal authority, narrate disputed facts and hypothetical fictions, represent persons before the law, move audiences with artful rhetoric, and invent new legal forms and concepts. Binder and Weisberg explain the literary theories and methods increasingly applied to law, and they introduce and synthesize the work of over a hundred authors in the fields of law, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. Drawing on these disparate bodies of scholarship, Binder and Weisberg analyze law as interpretation, narration, rhetoric, language, and culture, placing each of these approaches within the history of literary and legal thought. They sort the styles of analysis most likely to sharpen critical understanding from those that risk self-indulgent sentimentalism or sterile skepticism, and they endorse a broadly synthetic cultural criticism that views law as an arena for composing and contesting identity, status, and character. Such a cultural criticism would evaluate law not simply as a device for realizing rights and interests but also as the framework for a vibrant cultural life.

This book addresses why just about everything that we experience on Earth depends upon the ocean circulation, the movement of the ocean water. Intended for a general lay-person audience, or as a non-science major undergraduate text, the book explains (in a non-mathematical manner) how the ocean circulation and the ocean’s interactions with the atmosphere provides the basic underpinnings for global climate and ecology. It then launches into more specific topics of societal relevance (e.g., how the coastal ocean and estuaries work, sea level variations, ocean waves and extreme tsunamis, hurricane storm surge and wave damage, how ocean temperatures change seasonally, harmful algal blooms, alternative energy potential and fish recruitment). Whereas some of these applications have a Florida, USA emphasis, all of them are equally applicable to coastal regions elsewhere.