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Does The Reasonable Man Have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?, Lucille Jewel
Does The Reasonable Man Have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?, Lucille Jewel
College of Law Faculty Scholarship
The reasonable man is an anthropomorphic metaphor for legal reasoning. In this role, he sometimes shows symptoms of mental illness. He exhibits a compulsion to organize, rank, and prevent disorder, a process that can create unjust outcomes. When he is symptomatic, the reasonable man becomes a monster borne out of a fear of disorder. As the putative judge whom all lawyers write and speak in front of, the reasonable man is the reader attorneys fine-tune their arguments and language for. After developing a case history for the reasonable man, this Article engages with several questions. First, when advocates emulate the …
Old-School Rhetoric And New-School Cognitive Science: The Enduring Power Of Logocentric Categories, Lucille Jewel
Old-School Rhetoric And New-School Cognitive Science: The Enduring Power Of Logocentric Categories, Lucille Jewel
College of Law Faculty Scholarship
For thousands of years, the contours of Western legal argument have remained unchanged. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, lawyers have been presenting arguments in the same basic format, with a heavy reliance on the concept of logos, the idea that arguments are most persuasive when presented in a clear deductive logical structure using clean-cut categories. Forming the basis for the terms that appear in logocentric legal arguments, categories allow humans to group facts and information together into classes. For instance, chairs, tables, and beds occupy the category of furniture and cars; trucks, and motorcycles occupy the category of …