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13 Law, Culture & Human. 5 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/lculh13 and id is 1 raw text is: Law, Culture and the Humanities 2017, Vol. 13(1) 5 Editorial @ The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.ul/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/17438721 16629743 journals.sagepub.com/home/Ich OSAGE How do we remember, memorialize, and celebrate scholarship on which our own work is built? The answer seems straightforward. We cite that work and in citation acknowl- edge a debt to the past. Yet citation can be the barest form of remembrance and is by no means reliably celebratory. I recently organized a conference on Rhetorical Processes and Legal Judgments, during which one of the participants, Bernadette Meyler, pre- sented a wonderful paper offering a reading of the meaning of the citation of precedent in American Supreme Court decisions. She argued that when judges on opposite sides of a decision cite similar cases as precedent they establish the grounds for a dialogic engage- ment that might otherwise be lacking. Hearing Bernie's presentation I thought about other work that citation of precedent does, namely to remember, memorialize, and (sometimes) celebrate the work of those who have gone before. So in a law and humanities enterprise scholarly and judicial cita- tions work in parallel, establishing for scholars the grounds for dialogue with each other and with our intellectual ancestors. Another compelling reason why it is important for all of us to read the footnotes! Austin Sarat