Heracles' Bow

Heracles’ Bow is a collection of ten essays, written by James Boyd White in 1985, that examine forensic rhetoric as it creates community, as an example of what White calls constitutive rhetoric. White supported the Law and Literature Movement. This movement was in contradiction to two other movements of the 1970/80s: Law and economics and Critical Legal Studies (CLS), holding that a scientific view of law left little room to examine the rhetoric of written and spoken law itself.

In Heracles' Bow: Persuasion and Community in Philoctetes, through an analysis of the ancient Greek play Philoctetes, distinguishes between two methods of persuasion, dolos (deceitful persuasion) and peitho (genuine statements made for the purpose of forming community). White compares using rhetoric on another person as a means-to-an-end against viewing the person as an end-in-itself. He relates this to the teaching of law through a discussion of methods that an attorney should use in the art of persuading others.

In, Rhetoric and Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life, White compares two definitions of law: his own, which is that law is a branch of rhetoric, and the traditional view of law as institutional authority. He outlines three elements specific and necessary to legal rhetoric: first, that lawyers need to speak the language of their audience, or that law is culture-specific; second, that law is always a creative performance; and third, that legal rhetoric contains an ethical identity, or ethos.

The Study of Law as an Intellectual Activity, originally a lecture given to a class of first-year law students, outlines how learning law is not simply memorizing a set of rules. White claims that, in learning law, it is imperative that students first identify their own ethos to become effective practitioners.

In The Invisible Discourse of the Law, originally a lecture given to educators on writing, White argues that legal language is difficult to understand because the law is generalized and non-specific. These characteristics mean that legal language is always subject to the interpretation of the reader, thus creating a rhetorical situation.

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