James Boyd White (born 1938) is an American law professor, literary critic, scholar and philosopher who is generally credited with founding the "law and Literature" movement.
He practiced with the firm of Foley Hoag in Boston before moving into teaching.
It was designed essentially as a textbook for students studying legal language.
In The Legal Imagination, literary and other texts are compared to legal texts in the way they "constitute" the identities of characters and the meanings of concepts.
The book is thought to have "kicked off" the law and literature movement and is still widely influential.