Law Commons^™

The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students To Write Any Legal Document, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Employers bemoan that new lawyers cannot write. Professors teaching upper-level law school courses wonder why students cannot apply their first-year (1L) legal writing skills. Law students worry that their legal writing courses have not prepared them to write all of the document types they will encounter in practice. In response to these complaints and fears, law school administrators push legal writing professors to squeeze more and more different document types into first- year legal writing courses.

I argue that the “more documents” strategy does not adequately prepare practice-ready legal writers. We cannot inoculate our students against every conceivable genre that …

Hollywood's White Legal Heroes And The Legacy Of Slave Codes, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

This chapter explores the portrayal of black defendants in mainstream legal cinema and draws connections between these portrayals, the legacy of slave codes, and the Supreme Court's rejection of statistical and historical proof of racism in the application of the death penalty. I focus on a sub-genre of legal cinema, what I call the "White Legal Hero" narrative. The typical white legal hero film tells the story of an innocent or otherwise righteous black male defendant facing a capital charge. He is represented by a white male "hero" lawyer who tries to overcome the racist justice system. The failure of …

The Rhetoric Of Sissy-Slogans: How Denigrating The Feminine Perpetuates The Terror Wars, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

This article uses rhetorical tools to study the denigration of the feminine prevalent in popular U.S. discourse during the era of the terror wars. The article argues that denigration of the feminine, often in the form of “sissy-slogans,” actually helps perpetuate the terror wars by rhetorically crafting an overtly feminine — and weak — home front that needs protection from outside forces.

Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Empathy — how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the author, Lee — is a useful lens to view the depictions of racial injustice in the novel because empathy is the moral fulcrum on which the narrative turns. In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-racial empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel. In order to examine the concept of empathy, I have developed a critical framework derived from rhetorician Kenneth …

The Ideology Of Terror: Why We Will Never Win The 'War', Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

A few days after the criminal attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush declared a metaphorical war on terror. The word “war” was once again applied to a nebulous concept in hopes of rallying support to Bush’s plans. Had Bush declared war on “terrorism,” a noun that denotes physical acts of violence, the war would have remained attached to the material world. By declaring war on “terror,” America’s enemy became ephemeral and eternal. Using Althusser's theory of ideology, this article demonstrates how the public rhetoric of terror created an “ideology of terror” that created support for Bush's …