Law Commons^™

Justice, Play, And Politics, Eugene Garver

Mercer Law Review

Justice as Play is a highly illuminating gloss on Coke's idea of the law as "artificial reason," and one of its merits is that it is equally about the law as artificial and as reason. While he leans on Huizinga to talk about justice as play, Jack Sammons deepens the analogy by another meaning of play, celebrating the venerable connections between the trial and the drama as relatively insulated arenas for developing alternatives to the existing political order. According to Jack, legal argument can be regarded as play because of that relative insulation. So I want to turn from judicial …

Hearing Voices: Reading As Listening In Literature, Law, And Theology, James Boyd White

Mercer Law Review

Jack Sammons has always written from the center. Whether he is writing about teaching, or the legal profession, or law, or religion, or music, or baseball, or manners, everything he says comes from the same mysterious and powerful place: coherent, honest, generous, and sincere, not at all aggressive, but insistent upon the value and importance of the inquiry at hand. Jack writes as the whole person he is, with a constant and deep integrity.

As we all know, an important part of what Jack has written about is the world of sound and music, to which he is richly alive. …

Mercer Law Review Symposium Luncheon Remarks: Conversations With Jack Sammons, Daisy Hurst Floyd

Mercer Law Review

While this Symposium is about Jack Sammons's teaching and scholarship, I am going to exercise a speaker's privilege to focus on the personal. However, I am going to do so by borrowing from Jack's scholarly work because I, too, am going to talk about conversation. Not in the way that Jack and others have so provocatively used the word to characterize lawyers' work. But, rather I use it in a more literal way. When I think of memories of Jack, many of them are around significant conversations.

I first met Jack in 1996, when my husband Tim Floyd was invited …

Mercer Law Review Luncheon Symposium Remarks For Jack Sammons, Harold S. Lewis Jr.

Mercer Law Review

Jack's career has been conventional only in his continuity at a single law school for almost thirty-five years. (As for his time at Antioch School of Law, Tim Floyd reminded us at the Symposium dinner last night that while at Antioch, Jack did pioneering and influential work on lawyer competency. It would be surprising if even Jack remembers he was there before arriving at Mercer Law School, determined to shake it up.).

Institutional longevity aside, Jack's career has been exceptional, marked by a multitude of concerns that he somehow wove together. Whatever the coursework or scholarly task at hand, his …

Transcendental Sense And A Playful Approach: The Treaty Of Waitangi, Richard Dawson

Mercer Law Review

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My experience of reading Jack Sammons has resembled an OE [overseas experience]. In particular, I became aware of some taken-for-granted language that can conceal important dynamics in our engagement with language. I had explicitly identified some virtues relating to exercising "control" over language but had, as Sammons suggested, neglected possible vices. In order to avoid these vices, I could alter attention from "control" to "play," in the sense of a movement that can combine control with the out-of-control. (There are some virtues associated with the out-of-control, such as openness and receptivity.). Such play does not lend itself well to …

A Rhetorician's Practical Wisdom, Linda L. Berger

Mercer Law Review

For three years, I had the great good fortune to work in the office next to Jack Sammons. My good fortune extended to a coincidence of timing that allowed me to work with Jack on a co-authored article, The Law's Mystery. During the time I worked next door, I felt cursed by an inability to grasp concepts that to Jack appeared inevitable and essential, whether those inevitabilities and essences were to be found within the law, good lawyering, or good legal education. The curse persisted throughout the writing of The Law's Mystery.

For Jack, the essence of a …

Further Reflections On Teaching Professionalism: A Thank You Note To Jack Sammons, Patrick Emery Longan

Mercer Law Review

In 2009, I published Teaching Professionalism in this Law Review to describe the content and methods of Mercer's first-year course on professionalism. Since then, we have made significant changes to the course, and it seems fitting to share some of those developments in the context of a Symposium that honors the scholarship and teaching of Jack Sammons. As I noted in the earlier article, the idea for the course came from Jack before I ever came to Mercer. It is also appropriate to use this occasion for another reason. I can trace the early design of the course, and most …

Mind The Gap: Teaching Research As A Fluid, Ever-Present Concept In The First-Year Legal Research And Writing Classroom, Julie Spanbauer

Mercer Law Review

A couple of years ago, the closed-memorandum problem I assigned as the first writing project for my fresh-faced legal research and writing students involved a legal issue that I manipulated by eliminating discussion of one of the elements of a tort in order to simplify the assignment. Each of the cases provided to the students were similarly redacted to omit discussion of the same element. The students were given the standard instruction that they were not permitted to consult or cite to any outside sources. When I began reading their papers, I noticed that a majority of the students had …

What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion In Law And Literature, Thomas E. Simmons

Mercer Law Review

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The productive use of zombies in a law school curriculum is not limited to hypothetical scenarios and posing "what if' questions. The content of an interdisciplinary law and literature course could be expanded to include consideration of texts that reference zombies. While serious, canonical works such as Dickens's Bleak House, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, and Kafka's The Trial constitute examples of literature and film that merit serious study in a course in law and literature, I will assert that lesser texts should also be included, both as a way to highlight why Martin Scorsese outshines George …

Jack Sammons As Therapist, Joseph Vining

Mercer Law Review

This has been one of my deep fears-that people around me might put simple pleasure as enough reason for living, and that I might be unable to persuade them otherwise and would have to believe they were ultimately serious in saying so.

"There is only pleasure out there to seek," people often say. As for accepting pleasure as "enough," I can imagine them telling me that it is always easier to accept something as enough if there is nothing more. They would remind me how rich the basic pleasures are if sought and achieved, of consciousness itself, of sex, of …

The Discursive Ethics Of Jack Sammons, David T. Ritchie

Mercer Law Review

Professor Jack Sammons has been a widely celebrated teacher, community activist, and distinguished member of the bar. He is also a prolific scholar; perhaps the most prolific scholar the Mercer University School of Law has ever seen. My interest in the body of Jack's work, and hence my focus here, is on what I consider to be the core of his scholarly agenda. I would like to caution that this is my reading of Jack's work as a corpus. I am not entirely sure that Jack would agree with this reading (especially later on when I will make some connections …

Fisherman Jack: Living In "Juropolis"- The Fishing Village Of The Law, Mark L. Jones

Mercer Law Review

This Symposium celebrating and honoring the scholarship and teaching of my dear friend and colleague Jack Sammons provides a fitting occasion to follow up on a suggestion he made to me a couple of years ago. The occasion is especially fitting because, as I proceed with my account, I invite us to think about how Jack himself embodies and exemplifies this account in his own life. Specifically, I will extend Alasdair MacIntyre's short and partial narrative image of fishing crews and the fishing village and apply it to the "fishing village of the law," which I call "Juropolis." In doing …