Law and the Printed Word

Three hundred years after Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg's celebrated Bible first appeared in Mainz, Germany, ¹¹⁶ Chief Justice Charles Pratt Camden of the Court of Common Pleas proclaimed: "If it is law, it will be found in our books. If it is not be found there, it is not law." ¹¹⁷ Perfunctorily, the eighteenth­century English jurist accepted as gospel the notion that law did not, and could not, exist outside of its printed record. By the eighteenth century, there was only a hazy memory that the fifteenth century invention of print had ushered in a new legal culture.

When legal events or practices are captured in print, certain things occur. ¹¹⁸ First, typography pushes the individual and her life experience off the page of the law. The paper's borders frame legal reality and close it off from all "externalities." Printed text rules context. Second, by depersonalizing human experience, the printed text seeks to control its environment. Typography situates its subjects and insulates them from variable influences: "The [printed] text is sealed off from life and change." ¹¹⁹ Third, once print confines its subjects, it thereafter categorizes and organizes them. Glossaries, indexes, tables of contents, chapter and subchapter headings, footnotes, collections of cases, and the majority­minority rule dichotomy all marshall information and order its messages. These attributes of print contribute to the law's universal and abstract quality: Printed law turns more on reified concepts than on concrete reality, more on what the eye sees on the page than on what it sees off the page, more on the general than on the particular. Legal reality becomes the stuff of devices like "the reasonable man," that fictional man of the law for all seasons. ¹²⁰

Not surprisingly, these properties of print resemble those of its scribal counterpart, for, as we noted above, print enhanced the potentialities of script. Indeed, this enhancement actually transformed the legal reality of the scribal era. ¹²¹ Print maximized the manuscript's powers by minimizing its weaknesses. First and foremost, publication in the vernacular made possible mass communication: Print is a mass medium for a mass audience. Because print technology does not depend on a limited class of copiers and copies, it can duplicate the letter of the law for countless readers in countless times and in countless places. Moreover, because print technology does not suffer from the human errors of scribal copiers, the law's letter is more uniform, consistent, and therefore more reliable and authentic, copy after copy. ¹²²