Poirier described Theodore Baird’s freshman composition course at Amherst as a ‘radical immersion in the waywardness of language’ (1992: 180). When Poirier was a freshman, Walker Gibson contributed to the teaching of Baird’s course. Gibson went on to write Seeing and Writing , a composition course book, dedicated to Baird. Like Baird, he had a will to connect disciplines. In 1961, connecting law and literature, he published an article in the New York University Law Review titled ‘Literary Minds and Judicial Style’. At the outset of his article, he makes the claim ‘that certain terms and attitudes familiar to modern students of literature and language can be of direct and practical use to writers of legal compositions’ (Gibson 1961 : 915). His questions – ‘questions familiar to . . . the teacher of composition’ (921) – include: ‘To whom am I talking – who is my reader?’; ‘Who am “I” – that is, what sort of speaking voice shall I project by the manner in which I compose my language?’; and, ‘What relation should I express between this ‘I’ and my reader . . . ?’ When talking about the ‘voice’*-related ‘who’ questions, Gibson uses words that we apply to relations in our social lives – words such as ‘equal’, ‘patronized’, and ‘respect’ – to judge judges. In doing so, Gibson suggests that there is an unavoidable ethical element in writing:

The problem of composing good judicial writing cannot fi nally be so very different from the problem of composing any kind of good writing. The issues to be faced . . . come down pretty simply to a recognition of the virtues of one’s reader. If I can recognize my reader, if I can see in him a person of discretion and taste, one who shares with me a sense of the world’s

multiplicity and a sense of the tenuous relation between language and experience, then I am all right. By recognizing him, I defi ne him, and we may hope to communicate across the guarded boundaries that divide us.