Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures
41 Emory Law Journal 4 (1992); reprinted by permission of the Emory Law Journal
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Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts *
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
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Notes - Part IV

323. This quote is commonly attributed to John Adams, first from his Novanglus Letters of 1775, John Adams, 2 Papers of John Adams 314 (Robert J. Taylor ed., 1977) (Novanglus Letter No. VII), and repeated in the Massachusetts Constitution, Mass. Const. of 1780, Declaration of Rights, art. XXX. It is probably no coincidence that this concept was articulated at the same time that increased use and acceptance of print technology secured the written word's cultural ascendancy in America.

324. As one scholar has written of the ancient Greeks, "the laws for them are not cold principles once [and] for all embodied in the statute-book. They come forward as living and speaking personalities - questioning, reasoning, appealing, exhorting." Butcher, supra note 108, at 173.

325. On the provenance and history of these anthropological concepts, see Millie R. Creighton, Revisiting Shame and Guilt Cultures: A Forty-Year Pilgrimage, 18 Ethos 279 (1990).

326. On this remarkable phenomenon in early Greek culture, see R.W. Sharples, But Why Has My Spirit Spoken With Me Thus?: Homeric Decision-Making, 30 Greece & Romel (1983).

327. This terminology, drawn from Greek philosophy, is elaborated in Havelock, supra note 20, at 182.

328. Sir Henry S. Maine, Dissertations on Early Law and Custom 389 (New York, Henry Holt and Company 1883).

329. This change may be so slow and so antithetical to the overriding cultural goal of remembering that individuals within a performative legal system may be altogether unaware of it.