Law Commons^™

Rhetorical Repetition, Patrick Barry

Articles

When it comes to persuading judges, boardrooms, or even just co-workers, many lawyers shy away from repetition. They remain committed to the idea, often developed in college, that good writing is associated with having (and showing) a big vocabulary. They mistakenly think the best thesaurus wins. This essay explores that error and offers ways to correct it.

Uselessly Accurate, Patrick Barry

Articles

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis in details," Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote in his 1925 collection Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses. The problem hasn't gone away, as any reader of legal briefs, contracts, and memos can attest. This essay offers a few ways to help.

The Rule Of Three, Patrick Barry

Articles

Judges use the Rule of Three. Practitioners use the Rule of Three. And so do all manner of legal academics. Yet although many people seem to have an intuitive feel for how useful this rhetorical move is, no extended explanation of its mechanics and variety of forms exists. This essay offers that explanation. It begins with an introduction to the more straightforward form of the rule of three, which simply involves arranging information not in twos or fours or any other set of numbers-but rather in the trusty, melodic structure of threes. It then moves on to a closer look …

What We Still Don't Know About What Persuades Judges – And Some Ways We Might Find Out, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Over 25 years ago, in his foreword to the first volume of Legal Writing, Chris Rideout nailed it: legal writing as actually practiced by lawyers and judges needs to improve, “[b]ut more fundamental inquiry into legal writing...is needed as well.” The intervening decades have seen many laudable efforts on the latter front, as our collective scholarly discipline, then in its infancy, has matured. But one particular question that Rideout identified remains largely unaddressed by our discipline, although recent developments suggest a welcome increase in attention to the topic. Specifically, Rideout explained that our field did not know as much as …

The Cultural Background Of The Legal Imagination, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

I want to speak in this essay about one aspect of the origins of what is often called the law and literature movement in the United States, namely, how it got going. I shall do this by explaining the aims and assumptions of my own early contribution to it in the form of The Legal Imagination (first published in 1973). What I say will thus have some of the features of autobiography, but I hope it will be plain that this story is not really about me but about the state of the culture in which modern law and literature …

Condemnation Without Justification, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

On August 6-8, 2007, Prof. Neil Buchanan posted in Michael Dorf’s blog (http://michaeldorf.org/; for the blog entry regarding the death tax, see http:// michaeldorf.org/2007/08/dishonest-tax-rhetoric-part-3- of-3.html) a three-part series on what he deemed to be examples of political use of terminology to describe tax issues in a manner that is likely to mislead the public. Prof. Buchanan described this practice as ‘‘dishonest tax rhetoric.’’ He awarded first, second, and third prizes for the most egregious examples of dishonest rhetoric. I, however, found no objection to the usages he considered to be the two worst examples. Let us consider his first and …

Meaning What You Say, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

In this essay I talk about a wide range of themes in the hope of establishing a connection among them: writing (including the teaching of writing) and what is at stake, for the writer and the rest of the world, in doing it well or badly; certain forces in our culture-hard to define and understandthat tend to reduce or trivialize human experience, indeed the very value of the human being; the conception of the human being, not trivial at all, that underlies our practices of self-government in general and constitutional democracy in particular; and the idea of justice at work, …

Legal Knowledge, James Boyd White

Articles

What do we know when we know the law? I asked a rabbi I know how he would answer that question with respect to Jewish law. Does someone know the law when he can repeat the rules that tell him what to do? Or when he can engage in the activity of reading them, sepa­rately or in conjunction with each other, and applying them sensibly to new circumstances? Is even that enough? My friend said it was not: he must know who he is in relation to the law, both as an individual and as a member of a people; …

Writing And Reading In Philosophy, Law, And Poetry, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

In this paper I will treat a very general question, the nature of writing and what can be achieved by it, pursuing it in the three distinct contexts provided by philosophy, law, and poetry.

My starting-point will be Plato's Phaedrus, where, in a wellknown passage, Socrates attacks writing itself: he says that true philosophy requires the living engagement of mind with mind of a kind that writing cannot attain. Yet this is obviously a paradox, for Socrates' position is articulated and recorded by Plato in writing. How then can we make sense of what Plato is saying and doing? What …

Review Of Reason And Rhetoric In The Philosophy Of Hobbes, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

In the 1960s, Quentin Skinner wrote a series of polemical if terse papers arguing that the conventional approach to the history of political theory was confused. Using Hobbes as something of a vehicle for his position, Skinner enunciated what is now well known as the "Cambridge" approach to political theory. He urged that we situate authors in their intellectual contexts so that we can isolate what is distinctive, perhaps subversive, in their use of language: only then, he argued, can we have any valid historical understanding on what they are doing in writing these weird books in the first place. …

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.

Plato's 'Crito': The Authority Of Law And Philosophy (Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities), James Boyd White

Articles

My talk today will consist primarily of the interpretation of one of the dialogues of Plato, called the Crito. It will not have very much about law in it, and you may well wonder why such a lecture is being given in a law school. Let me begin by saying a word or two in response to that sensible question, as a way of framing the reading that follows.

Imagining The Law, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

My aim in this paper is to trace out a certain line of thought about what it might mean to think of law rhetorically. In doing this I shall be resisting the impulse, quite common in our culture, to see the law from the outside, as a kind of intellectual and social bureaucracy; rather I am interested in seeing it from the inside, as it appears to one who is practicing or teaching it. Throughout I shall conceive of the law as a system of discourse that the lawyer and judge must learn and use, and of which we can …

Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White

Articles

Except for one meeting, which I will describe below, I knew Bob Cover only through his writings. This circumstance was of course a disappointment to me, for our interests were similar, and his death now makes the loss irreparable. But perhaps this is less of a limitation than would normally be the case, for as much as anyone in the law Bob was, and is, actively present in his writing, both as a person and as a mind.-But that dichotomy of person and mind gets it wrong, for what I would like to catch is a sense of fusion or …

Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White

Articles

I want to preface my remarks by saying something about the kind of talk this is going to be. As my title says, I shall speak mainly about economics and law, which I shall examine as forms of thought and life, or what I shall call cultures. With law, about which in fact I shall speak rather briefly, I am naturally familiar by training and experience. But with economics I am familiar only as an observer­ as a general reader who reads the newspaper, as a lawyer who has followed a little of the law and economics literature, and as …

Law As Rhetoric, Rhetoric As Law: The Arts Of Cultural And Communal Life, James Boyd White

Articles

In this paper I shall suggest that law is most usefully seen not, as it usually is by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric; and that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate subject. I do not mean …

The Ethics Of Argument: Plato's Gorgias And The Modern Lawyer, James Boyd White

Articles

In what follows I shall analyze Plato's text and do my best to suggest a response to it. But I should say at the outset that for the modern lawyer and law teacher this is not merely an academic exercise, for we in fact are rhetoricians very much as Plato defines them. What is at stake for us in reading this dialogue is what it means to have devoted ourselves to the set of social and intellectual practices that define the profession of law. We have a special relation to this text, for we can in the full Platonic sense …