Law Commons^™

This presentation describes an empirical study that asks whether lawyers and judges use legal analogy on a day-to-day basis in a manner that reflects normative standards of reasonableness and rationality. From a theoretical perspective legal philosophers deny, transform, or mystify legal analogy, but lawyers and judges use it every day without comment. The question is important because we expect lawyers and judges use legal analogy thousands of times per day and law schools teach it as a basic skill. The argumentation schemes of informal logic supply a theoretical framework in the form of an argumentation scheme, but we do not …

If I say “He’s an eligible BLANK,” you’re likely to complete the sentence with “bachelor.” The fact that “eligible” and “bachelor” often appear together--in corpus-linguistic terms, they are collocated--tells us something about the meaning of “bachelor” that is not in its dictionary definition and related social values (e.g., gendered ones, in this example). This workshop, sponsored by the Linguistics, Language, and Writing (LLW) Standing Group, used hands-on activities to introduce theories and methods of corpus-linguistic analysis for various purposes, genres, and sub-fields within writing studies. Facilitators guided attendees through examples of the use of corpus methods in FYC, writing center …