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Full-Text Articles in Law
Speaking The Truth: Supporting Authentic Advocacy With Professional Identity Formation, Laura A. Webb
Speaking The Truth: Supporting Authentic Advocacy With Professional Identity Formation, Laura A. Webb
Law Faculty Publications
When law students are asked to articulate legal rules in a persuasive communication such as a brief, they may experience internal tension. Their version of the rule, as framed to benefit a particular client’s position, may be different from the way they would articulate the rule if they were not taking on an advocate’s role. The conflict between those two versions of a legal rule leads some students to wonder if advocacy itself is deceptive, if an advocate’s role requires one to sacrifice ethics for success, and if ancient Greek philosophers were correct when they derided persuasive communication as “trickery …
Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric To Validate Legal Reasoning, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric To Validate Legal Reasoning, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
At the inception of their careers, most lawyers have little or no background in classical rhetoric. Many law students enter law school thinking that they will receive formal training in either logic or rhetoric, but very few law schools even teach classes in these subjects. In the absence of any formal training, most lawyers learn to write persuasively by imitating “good” legal writing. The consequence for the legal profession is an abundance of legal writing that is not grounded conceptually in the rhetorical tradition from which it is derived. The principal problem with legal writing is not that lawyers cannot …