Law Commons^™

The Trouble With Categories: What Theory Can Teach Us About The Doctrine-Skills Divide, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

We might not need another article decrying the doctrine/skills dichotomy. That conversation seems increasingly old and tired. But like it or not, in conversations about the urgent need to reform legal education, the dichotomy’s entailments confront us at every turn. Is there something more to be said? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. We teach our students to examine language carefully, to question received categories, and to understand legal questions in light of their history and theory. Yet when we talk about the doctrine/skills divide, we seem to forget our own instruction.

This article does not exactly take sides in the typical skills …

The Hermeneutical And Rhetorical Nature Of Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In its most venal manifestation, scholarly writing betrays the anxiety of influence by claiming to offer a radically new solution to age-old conundrums. The goal is to make a clean break from a traditional path of thought that has become trapped in a cul-de-sac, to make progress by finding a new way forward. Not so with Jean Porter’s work, and particularly her most recent book. Professor Porter demonstrates that thinking through an established tradition – one that has responded to numerous challenges within very different contexts over several millennia – can sometimes offer the most productive response to contemporary dilemmas. …

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 …

The Irrelevance Of Contemporary Academic Philosophy For Law: Recovering The Rhetorical Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This short paper appears in a volume of original essays, On Philosophy in American Law (Francis J. Mootz III ed., Cambridge Univ. Press 2009). I argue that the undeniable rift between philosophy and law is more than a simple dichotomy of theory and practice. Instead, the sharp distinction between philosophy and law occurred when both disciplines built insular guilds that employed distinctive vocabularies to distinguish themselves from rhetoric, and it is by returning to their roots in rhetoric that philosophy and law might find their common ground in the elucidation of rhetorical knowledge.

Book Review Symposium: Introduction, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

A foreword to a symposium held to discuss Gene Garver’s book, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Natural Law And The Cultivation Of Legal Rhetoric, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This essay appeared in a book celebrating Lon Fuller's contributions to jurisprudence. In it, Professor Mootz argued that Fuller's conception of secular natural law, designated as an "internal morality of law," lends welcome assistance to the effort to articulate a new direction in legal philosophy. He defended Fuller's natural-law approach from the common misinterpretations that it is either a hollow echo of the natural law tradition or an essentialist conception of law at odds with the legal-realist world that he helped to create with his doctrinal scholarship. By reading his famous, "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers," in a new …