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Full-Text Articles in Law

Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Jake, Edith Brown Weiss Jan 2003

Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Jake, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Jake and I were professional colleagues and friends for more than twenty years, but it was in the last fifteen years that we worked closely together, bridging the supposed divide between political science and international law. Sometimes we worked together in the American Society of International Law, other times in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), or in the Human Dimensions of Global Change program. Most often, we worked together as scholars in interdisciplinary research.


Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse Jan 2003

Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1933, one of the leading theorists of the criminal law, Jerome Michael, wrote openly of the criminal law "as an instrument of the state." Today, criminal law is largely allergic to claims of political theory; commentators obsess about theories of deterrence and retribution, and the technical details of model codes and sentencing grids, but rarely speak of institutional effects or political commitments. In this article, the author aims to change that emphasis and to examine the criminal law as a tool for governance. Her approach is explicitly constructive: it accepts the criminal law that we have, places it in …


Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric To Validate Legal Reasoning, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione Jan 2003

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 …