Politics & Power Quote by Edward Levi

Levi is quietly trying to rescue law from its own costume: the lab coat of “objective” rules and impersonal logic. By calling law a liberal art, he yanks it back into the messy human realm where meaning is made, argued over, revised, and strategically deployed. The move is both elevating and disarming. Elevating, because it places legal reasoning alongside rhetoric, philosophy, and literature as a craft with traditions and techniques. Disarming, because it admits what jurists often prefer to downplay: law is not just discovered; it is composed.

The key phrase is “words of persuasion.” Levi is pointing at the engine of legal authority: not facts alone, but narratives that can survive cross-examination and win institutional assent. When he adds “changing definitions,” he’s acknowledging the law’s most controversial talent - its ability to stretch old language over new realities. That flexibility can look like wisdom (adapting “privacy” to modern surveillance) or like opportunism (reframing “security” to justify expanded state power). Levi doesn’t moralize; he describes the mechanism.

The subtext is a warning as much as a celebration. If law is an art, then judges and lawyers are not neutral technicians; they are authors with real-world consequences. “Practical ends” lands as the final blunt reminder: legal language ultimately aims to move bodies, money, freedoms. In mid-century American legal culture - Levi wrote influentially about “legal reasoning” and analogy - this is a corrective to legal formalism: the claim that law is merely the application of fixed rules. Levi’s intent is to make the profession more honest about its own creativity, and therefore more accountable for how it uses it.