Law Commons^™

Cartoon Contracts And The Proactive Visualization Of Law, Michael D. Murray

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Contracts have always relied on text first, foremost, and usually exclusively. Yet, this approach leaves many users of contracts in the dark as to the actual meaning of the transactional documents and instruments they enter into. The average contract routinely uses language that only lawyers, law-trained readers, and highly literate persons can truly understand. There is a movement in the law in the United States and many other nations called the visualization of law movement that attempts to bridge these gaps in contractual communication by using highly visual instruments. In appropriate circumstances, even cartoons and comic book forms of sequential …

Regarding Narrative Justice, Womxn, Geeta Tewari

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The story within this article explores how narrative justice can be applied as a form of advocacy for persons seeking access to justice. The questions—what is narrative justice? How do we define it?—deserve a separate space, which will be shared in a forthcoming article. Meanwhile, in short, narrative justice is the power of the word—written, spoken, articulated with the emotion or experience of an individual or collective, to shape or express reaction to law and policy.

Ncaa Athletes, Unpaid Interns And The S-Word: Exploring The Rhetorical Impact Of The Language Of Slavery, Maria Ontiveros

Maria L. Ontiveros

Visual Jurisprudence, Richard Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

Lawyers, judges, and jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument inside the contemporary courtroom. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image, but also the mimetic capacity itself, …

Perelman's Theory Of Argumentation And Natural Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Chaim Perelman resuscitated the rhetorical tradition by developing an elegant and detailed theory of argumentation. Rejecting the single-minded Cartesian focus on rational truth, Perelman recovered the ancient wisdom that we can argue reasonably about matters that admit only of probability. From this one would conclude that Perelman’s argumentation theory is inalterably opposed to natural law, and therefore that I would have done better to have written an article titled “Perelman’s Th eory of Argumentation as a Rejection of Natural Law.”

However, my thesis is precisely that Perelman’s theory of argumentation connects to the natural law tradition in interesting and productive …

Kahn's Reign And Its Metaphors For Law -- A Critique In The Philosophy Of Legal Culture, Alani Golanski

Alani Golanski

This essay analyzes the three main metaphors through which Professor Paul Kahn, Yale Law, constructs both a substantive picture of law's appearance and his methodological thesis that nonlegal sources need not, and should not, be explored in explaining the rule of law. These metaphors are (1) law as language, (2) law as religion, and (3) law as "legal" artifact. This essay argues that (1) and (2) are acceptable metaphors, but that Kahn's treatment is imprecise, and the metaphors work better if handled differently. Regarding (3), the limitations Kahn imposes are untenable.

Review Of Authority: Construction And Corrosion, William I. Miller

Reviews

This is in many ways an engaging book, written in a refreshingly direct and unobfuscatory style. Its chief problem is living up to the rather grand expectations raised by the title, expectations that the author half-way through the enterprise admits he did not mean to evoke (p. 74). What the reader will find is less a systematic essay or sustained treatment of authority than several penetrating readings of intense conflicts dealing with a substantially narrower issue: controlling who gets to speak in public settings that are authority conferring - in councils, senates and law courts.