‘DITTO’: law, pop culture and humanities and the impact of intergenerational interpretative dissonance

Building on Julius Stone’s remark that jurisprudence is law’s extroversion (or

extraversion), this essay explores the consequences that flow from the loss of a shared humanities

discourse by lawyers. In adapting the concept of extraversion to those things about us in the world,

the essay considers the finding of an empirical study, Law’s Gens Project, which revealed a profound,

almost seismic shift in what different generational groupings of lawyers know, based in the

humanities, placing this point of rupture squarely in the 1970s. Drawing on allusions and cultural

references used in judgments, this project reveals how these cultural markers affect legal

interpretation. Generational slippages arise when shared humanities discourses are lost. It is thus

necessary to think about what happens when the texts of law can no longer be read when the arsenal

needed to read them canonically disappears—that is, when it is no longer possible to read the texts

as they were intended, not because of any change in legal knowledge in its barest sense, but when

the humanities discourses needed to decode their meanings are lost.