Law Commons^™

Spaceball (Or, Not Everything That's Left Is Postmodern), Dennis W. Arrow

Vanderbilt Law Review

Given law-school postmodernism's epistemo/ontology of juvenile antirealist agnosticism, its commitment to Gadamerian and/or Derridean notions of linguistic indeterminacy, its mono- maniacal dedication to centrifugal end-justifies-the-means Lefty politics, its abhorrence of commonly recognized conceptions of neutral principle, its concomitant disrespect for the very notion of truth, and its inextricably intertwined obsession with names and propensity for linguistic doublespeak, Professor Arrow confesses to initially wondering what it might "mean" to take anything uttered by a postmodernist "literally," or at "face value." But undaunted by that 'paradox," Professor Arrow not only takes up Feldman's challenge to "critique postmodernism on its own terms" (by …

Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …

Language Policy In Central Asia, Baktygul M. Ismailova

Master's Capstone Projects

This study addresses language policy and language planning in the five Central Asian republics, former constituents of the Soviet Union. Language issues became crucial after the breakdown of the Soviet system, which completely changed the linguistic environment in the region. The study discusses two main issues related to the language planning in central Asia. The first section of the project describes the history of the region before 1917, when lifestyle patterns divided Central Asian residents into two groups, nomads (Kyrgyz, Kazak and Turkmen) and sedentary peoples (Tajik and Uzbek).

After a brief discussion of schooling practices in pre-Soviet Central Asia, …

Syntax Before Semantics, Structure Before Content (Book Review Of Carstairs-Mccarthy On Language-Origins), Daniel Hutto

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Carstairs-McCarthy's book sets out a bold proposal that constitutes an exciting challenge to the idea that the development of modern syntax was driven by the contentful divisions of language. Instead he posits a physiological cause in order to explain why the core aspects of modern syntax are as they are. It is a great virtue of the book that it carefully reviews a vast interdisciplinary literature encompassing biology, anthropology, neuroscience and the study of apes to support this startling hypothesis. Moreover, the author does a good job of raising doubts about the handful of views that would otherwise contradict it. …

Meaning, Intention, And The Hearsay Rule., Paul F. Kirgis

Faculty Law Review Articles

In this Article, I draw on insights from the linguistic discipline of pragmatics to offer another way to understand and apply the definition of hearsay in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Pragmatics is concerned with how we use language in real-world contexts to accomplish various objectives.' By identifying the conventions that govern language usage, pragmatics provides ways to analyze what a speaker means when he says something and how meaning is conveyed through language.5 Pragmatics thus has obvious utility for the study of hearsay.

The philosopher Paul Grice looms over the field of pragmatics. His theory of conversational implicature revolutionized …

All Children Can Learn: Providing Equal Education Opportunities For Migrant Students, Michelle R. Holleman

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

The United States Supreme Court ruled that once a state undertakes to provide children with educational opportunities, such education services must be available to all children on equal terms. However, even though all states must offer a public education system, certain classes of children are not receiving equal educational opportunities. Migrant children are one of the most disadvantaged groups in today’s education system. Some of the unique challenges these children face include interrupted schooling, limited English proficiency, poverty, lack of health and nutrition, pressures from work and family responsibilities, and a lack of parental involvement in their education. These hurdles …

How To Talk About Religion, James Boyd White

Articles

Our experience, supported we think by that of others, is that it is most difficult to do this well, whether we are trying to talk about religion within a discipline, such as law or psychology or anthropology, or even in more informal ways, with our friends and colleagues. There are many reasons for this: It is in the nature of religious experience to be ineffable or mysterious, at least for some people or in some religions; different religions imagine the world and its human inhabitants, and their histories, in ways that are enormously different; and there is no superlanguage into …