Law Commons^™

Scholarship And Teaching After 175 Years, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A quarter century ago, I presided at the 150th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Cincinnati Law School. Newly appointed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor came to dedicate the radically refurbished Taft Hall in the spring of 1983 and to say good things about our long history. This year we begin to celebrate the College's 175th anniversary. For its dedicatory issue, the editor-in-chief of the Law Review, Matthew Singer, invited me to write an introduction as well as to reflect on those twenty-five years and the challenges and opportunities I see ahead for us. Especially as an emeritus dean and …

What We Share, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Anyone involved in legal education today may wonder where we are, and what we are doing, in our task of teaching. While I am no better placed than anyone else to be able to offer anything approaching a synoptic view of legal education, I can still offer a few thoughts on teaching law. These thoughts are meant neither as a dire warning nor as a call to action. They are published, rather, out of a desire to share some ideas I have culled from the experience of teaching these past twenty years in law school. Teachers and students who find …

Looking Back In Pursuit Of The Art Of Law, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As part of the centennial celebration of the Washington College of Law, I am pleased to accept the invitation of The Law Review to revisit those six fascinating years of my deanship from 1971 to 1977. It is time for a backward glance in light of the profound changes that have since taken place in society, as well as in the Washington College of Law (WCL).

Bitter Knowledge: Socrates And Teaching By Disillusionment, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay examines Socratic teaching by investigating one aspect of my own practice in law school today; its companion essay, "The Poverty of Socratic Questioning: Asking and Answering in the Meno," examines Socratic teaching by investigating Socrates' practice in the Meno. They are meant to complement, and to complicate, one another. They also are meant to extend and to supplement some of the views of Socratic teaching expressed in two earlier essays'ofmine: Must Virtue Be Taught?, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 495 (1987); and "Neuer
Mind the Manner of My Speech," 14 LEGAL STUD. F. 253 (1990).

Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities. Introduction: Conducting Our Educations In Public, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This symposium grew out of James Boyd White's Marx Lecture, given April 21, 1994, at the University of Cincinnati, and this issue owes its existence to some happy coincidences with that event. One coincidence was the idea occurring to a number of us that, as nice as it would be to publish Professor White's thoughts on the Crito in these pages of the Law Review, how much nicer still it would be to surround those thoughts, or to follow them, with the thoughts of other scholars in the field, showing how these others responded to the text discussed by White …

The Poverty Of Socratic Questioning: Asking And Answering In The Meno, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay examines Socratic teaching by investigating Socrates' practice in the Meno. Its companion essay, Bitter Knowledge: Socrates and Teaching by Disillusionment, examines Socratic teaching by investigating my own practice in law school today. They are meant to complement and to complicate one another, as they also are meant to extend and to supplement some of the views of Socratic teaching expressed in two earlier essays of mine: Thomas D. Eisele, Must Virtue Be Taught?, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 495 (1987) [hereinafter Eisele, Virtue]; and Thomas D. Eisele, "Never Mind the Manner of My Speech": The Dilemma of Socrates' Defense …

Thinking Things, Not Words: Irvin Rutter's Pragmatic Jurisprudence Of Teaching, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Those of us in legal education and in the profession of law are in debt to the Law Review for publishing in this issue the last work of the late Professor Irvin Rutter, Law, Language, and Thinking Like a Lawyer.

On the occasion of Irvin Rutter's retirement in 1980, I briefly summarized these earlier contributions, locating them within the legal realist tradition, and we awaited the publication of his last work, then still in draft not quite satisfactory to Professor Rutter. In this essay, I situate his final work on teaching law in the pragmatist tradition with special emphasis on …

"Our Real Need": Not Explanation, But Education, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Wittgenstein wrote nothing on legal theory or law, so there is no obvious textual basis on which to draw possible connections between Wittgenstein and legal theory. And Wittgenstein abhorred theorizing in philosophy. So the odds are slim that Wittgenstein would have accommodated himself or his work to similar activity in the law. Where does this leave us?

At sea, which is where we normally are in life and, thus, where Wittgenstein wants us to recognize ourselves as being when doing philosophy too. But theory can disguise this fact from us, as it also can make us think that we have …

Wittgenstein's Instructive Narratives: Leaving The Lessons Latent, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Philosophical Investigations is one of the great works about instruction, as Stanley Cavell says, because it is a great work of instruction. It dot::s not simply tell us about instruction; it shows us instruction in action-by instructing us. But it does this in a disconcerting way; it instructs us indirectly or latently. And often it uses stories to do this.

Wittgenstein rarely states a thesis or a conclusion that he then wants us simply to approve or accept. Rather, he directs our attention to some fact or phenomenon and invites our response to it, sometimes by giving us his response …

Must Virtue Be Taught?, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

The Activity Of Being A Lawyer: The Imaginative Pursuit Of Implications And Possibilities, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

If law as an activity emerged naively and unpremeditated, as a direction of attention pursued without premonition of what it would lead to, then by now it has hollowed out a character for itself, as Oakeshott says, and has become specified in a "practice." Having acquired this firmness of character, as Oakeshott further says, law may present itself as a puzzle, thus provoking reflection. Thinking about law in this manner or mood is something that I wish to call "philosophy of law," and this is itself an honorable activity with a character and mannerisms of its own.2 In law school, …