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Rhetoric and Composition

Law and Literature

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Rooted: Metaphors And Judicial Philosophy In Artis V. District Of Columbia, Richard L. Heppner Jr. Jan 2023

Rooted: Metaphors And Judicial Philosophy In Artis V. District Of Columbia, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines how the metaphors in judicial opinions reveal judicial theories of lawmaking and judicial philosophies, through a close reading of Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion and Justice Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion in the Artis v. District of Columbia, 138 S. Ct. 594 (2018).

Artis was about what the phrase “shall be tolled” means in the federal supplemental jurisdiction statute, 28 U.S.C. §1367. Does a state-law claim’s statute of limitations pause or continue to run while the claim is in federal court? In holding that Congress used “stop the clock” tolling, an “off-the-shelf” legal device that pauses statute of limitations, …


Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal Jan 2010

Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Empathy — how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the author, Lee — is a useful lens to view the depictions of racial injustice in the novel because empathy is the moral fulcrum on which the narrative turns. In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-racial empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel. In order to examine the concept of empathy, I have developed a critical framework derived from rhetorician Kenneth …


The Rhetoric Of Catharsis And Change: Law School Autobiography As A Nonfiction Law And Literature Subgenre, Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2010

The Rhetoric Of Catharsis And Change: Law School Autobiography As A Nonfiction Law And Literature Subgenre, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Carlo A. Pedrioli

To date, little scholarship, if any, has addressed the autobiographies of law students, which have appeared in law review articles and books since at least the late 1970s. This shortcoming of law and literature scholarship in the nonfiction genre of autobiography is problematic. In the interest of understanding diverse perspectives in the legal community, legal scholars with autobiographical interests ought to give attention to the autobiographies of different individuals in this community, including the law students who will be the future members of the profession. Also, this shortcoming leaves a gap in the narrative discourse of the law since lawyers …