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Selected Works

Brian Larson

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Law

Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian N. Larson, Amy D. Propen Oct 2018

Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian N. Larson, Amy D. Propen

Brian Larson

We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, anti-social personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. …

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Research And Rhetorical Purpose: Using Genre Analysis To Understand Source Use In Technical And Professional Writing, Lee-Ann K. Breuch, Brian N. Larson Oct 2018

Research And Rhetorical Purpose: Using Genre Analysis To Understand Source Use In Technical And Professional Writing, Lee-Ann K. Breuch, Brian N. Larson

Brian Larson

This chapter describes a pilot study of student research-based writing in a technical and professional writing course designed for college-level juniors and seniors across the curriculum; fifteen analytical research papers are coded based on the rhetorical move John Swales (1990) calls "reference to previous research" to increase our understanding of how students use sources to introduce, support, or compare/ contrast ideas and previous research. Student papers in this study overwhelmingly used sources to support main ideas, occasionally used sources to introduce ideas, often in the form of topic sentences, but rarely used sources to compare/ contrast ideas. The frequency of …

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Weird Science: The Empircial Study Of Legal Writing/Describing Law’S Enterprise: Moving From Theory To Research Question To Research Design And Implementation, Brian Larson Jul 2018

Weird Science: The Empircial Study Of Legal Writing/Describing Law’S Enterprise: Moving From Theory To Research Question To Research Design And Implementation, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

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 …

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How We Built A Scholarly Working Group Devoted To Classical Legal Rhetoric (And How You Can Do The Same Thing With Other Legal Writing Subjects), Brian Larson, Kirsten K. Davis, Lori D. Johnson, Ted Becker, Susan E. Provenzano Jul 2018

How We Built A Scholarly Working Group Devoted To Classical Legal Rhetoric (And How You Can Do The Same Thing With Other Legal Writing Subjects), Brian Larson, Kirsten K. Davis, Lori D. Johnson, Ted Becker, Susan E. Provenzano

Brian Larson

As academic disciplines mature, professors with specialized interests within their field often gravitate toward each other to pursue their interests collectively. Eventually, members of a group might find themselves collaborating on presentations, articles, or similar endeavors, with the goal of advancing an academic specialty.

To our knowledge, however, few such groups appear to exist in the LRW community (notable exceptions: applied legal storytelling; LWI’s Discipline-Building Working Group’s bibliography program). Our presentation hopes to model how LRW professors can come together to explore a single aspect of the legal writing field. We’ll discuss how we brought together over two dozen professors …

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Flag-Waving: Visual Arguments, Verbal Reconstruction, And Speaker Intentions, Brian Larson Jul 2018

Flag-Waving: Visual Arguments, Verbal Reconstruction, And Speaker Intentions, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

This study extends previous work in visual argumentation by studying speakers’ own verbal reconstructions of their visual communicative acts. The researcher interviewed 70 persons wearing or carrying American flags at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia in July 2016, to determine whether “speakers” make arguments by wearing or carrying it. For more than 20 years, theorists have debated whether it is meaningful to speak of "visual arguments," whether they can be purely visual, non-verbal communication, and whether and how they can be reconstructed in the form of the conclusion-support structure of an argument. This analysis provides …

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Celebrating Classical Rhetoric & Building Contemporary Law, Brian Larson Jun 2018

Celebrating Classical Rhetoric & Building Contemporary Law, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

Classical rhetoric and the western legal tradition were born together in the Greek city-states of the 5th century BCE. Yet little is said about Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian (for example) in contemporary law schools, and lawyers know little about the classical rhetorical foundations of their practice. Beginning in 2017, a group of two dozen scholars (mostly teachers of communication and legal theory in law schools) began a distance reading-group to examine the intersections between classical rhetorical theory and contemporary legal theory, practice, and education. This special-format session will present some of the group’s findings in the form of a …

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Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian Larson, Amy D. Propen Apr 2018

Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian Larson, Amy D. Propen

Brian Larson

We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, anti-social personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. …

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Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson Mar 2018

Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

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 …

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By Reading This Title, You Have Agreed To Our Terms Of Service, Brian Larson Feb 2018

By Reading This Title, You Have Agreed To Our Terms Of Service, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

By June of 2017, Facebook had two billion (that’s billion, with a ‘b’) users accessing it per month (Balakrishnan 2017). Facebook believes that each of those consumer end-users is bound by its end-user license agreement (EULA), which Facebook calls a “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” available to end-users from a small link in light gray text called “Terms” on every Facebook page. EULAs like this, associated with websites, mobile apps, and consumer goods with embedded software, and styled “terms of service,” “terms of use,” etc., may purport to impose a wide variety of contractual obligations on consumers, for example depriving …

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Use What You Choose: Applying Computational Methods To Genre Studies In Technical Communication, Brian N. Larson, William Hart-Davidon, Kenneth C. Walker, Douglas M. Walls, Ryan Omizo Oct 2017

Use What You Choose: Applying Computational Methods To Genre Studies In Technical Communication, Brian N. Larson, William Hart-Davidon, Kenneth C. Walker, Douglas M. Walls, Ryan Omizo

Brian Larson

This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from recurring social actions. We discovered evidence of genre hybridity in the signals of instructional genres embedded into customer reviews. Our paper discusses the creation of a prototype web application, "Use What You Choose" (UWYC), which sorts the …

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Gender As A Variable In Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations, Brian N. Larson Oct 2017

Gender As A Variable In Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations, Brian N. Larson

Brian Larson

Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners. The principles outlined here should guide practitioners, researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.

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Second Class For The Second Time: How The Commercial Speech Doctrine Stigmatizes Commercial Use Of Aggregated Public Records, Brian N. Larson, Genelle I. Belmas Oct 2017

Second Class For The Second Time: How The Commercial Speech Doctrine Stigmatizes Commercial Use Of Aggregated Public Records, Brian N. Larson, Genelle I. Belmas

Brian Larson

This Article argues that access to aggregated electronic public records for commercial use should receive protection under the First Amendment in the same measure as the speech acts the access supports. In other words, we view commercial access to aggregated public records as an essential means to valuable speech. For many, however, the taint of the commercial speech doctrine is turning all “information flows” into commercial ones. This, in turn, is threatening the access to government records.

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The Structured Writing Group: A Different Writing Center?, Brian N. Larson, Christopher Soper Oct 2017

The Structured Writing Group: A Different Writing Center?, Brian N. Larson, Christopher Soper

Brian Larson

This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. We added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.

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Gender As A Variable In Writing Studies: Ethics And Methodology, Brian Larson Feb 2017

Gender As A Variable In Writing Studies: Ethics And Methodology, Brian Larson

Brian Larson


This presentation uses results of a study where participants identified their own genders to illustrate ethical and methodological problems. It makes normative claims about gender as a variable in studies of written communication, including composition studies, technical and computer-mediated communication, and natural language processing.
 
Theories of gender and communication include early gender-difference/dominance views, social role theory, standpoint theory, and queer theory. Nevertheless, empirical researchers often use gender as a variable without explaining how they ascribe it to participants or what they intend it to mean. For example, Tebeaux and Allen performed studies in technical communication with gender as a …

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La Meme Chose: Lawyers' Use Of Exemplary Reasoning In Persuasive Writing, Brian Larson May 2016

La Meme Chose: Lawyers' Use Of Exemplary Reasoning In Persuasive Writing, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

No abstract provided.

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Star-Spangled: The Flag As Tool Of Protest And Nationalism, Brian Larson, Genelle I. Belmas Mar 2016

Star-Spangled: The Flag As Tool Of Protest And Nationalism, Brian Larson, Genelle I. Belmas

Brian Larson

The American flag is an important rhetorical resource for U.S. citizens performing civic identity and is at the center of legal battles to protect it from debasement. The debate is frequently renewed, most recently by protesters standing on the flag to protest police violence against African Americans. The flag-protection policy most commonly proposed is a constitutional amendment that would stand as a unique exception to the First Amendment's protection of free expression. Explorations of the flag in the humanities and social sciences have focused on big theory: the flag as an excuse for moral panic or as totemic emblem of …

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