Our Word Is Our Bond

Marianne Constable is Professor and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law(2005) and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (1994), winner of the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History.

• Introduction: Obama's Oaths1. How to Do Things with Law2. Learning by the Rules3. Legal Acts as Social Acts4. When Words Go WrongConclusion: The Name of the Law

"The commentary is penetrating and illuminating as it draws on what is known and what is unknown about how words matter in law . . . As with her earlier books, passion and scholarship engage to provoke thought without being argumentative . . . Highly recommended."—J. Brigham, Choice "Our Word is Our Bond transforms how we think about law, about language, and above all about the inextricable interdependencies that enmesh them. Marianne Constable explores the sovereignty of language in and over law with insight, eloquence, erudition, subtlety and imagination."—Martin Krygier, University of New South Wales, Australia "Combining theory and case law, linguistics and jurisprudence, Our Word is Our Bond provides a uniquely sophisticated and dramatically accessible guide to the rhetoric of justice and the politics of judgment. Barack Obama's flubbed oath of office, Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad, the California Criminal Code are but a few of the diverse array of substantive examples that Constable subjects to coruscating critical disposition."—Peter Goodrich, Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University "To be commended here is Constable's excruciating attention to detail, something which is evidenced via her exacting dissections of the examples at hand and the four appendices which close the book...Constable's monograph is (in this author's opinion) a strong continuation of the legal scholarship and methodological development seen in her previous monograph"—Chris Lloyd, Feminist Legal Studies