Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …