Legal Argumentation (2022 ed., fall 2021 version)

This is the second, and still profoundly drafty, version of the legal-writing textbook that I premiered last year. You can read all about it in last year’s blog post. I welcome your feedback. I’m really hoping to have all the chapters finished before next year’s edition. Here it is: https://rhetoricked.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Legal-Argumentation-fall-2021-ver.-FINAL.pdf

Mooting classical rhetoric in contemporary legal education

Among the law-related papers and panels at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America conference is one that I’m coordinating. The speakers include Kirsten Davis, Stetson University College of Law; Francis J. Mootz, McGeorge School of Law; Susan Provenzano, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; Susie Salmon, The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Date/time and location details appear on my other post about RSA. Here is the abstract. Celebrating Classical Rhetoric & Building Contemporary Law Classical rhetoric and the western legal tradition were born together in the Greek city states of the 5th century BCE. Yet little is Read More …

Does it matter to the legal profession and pedagogy that men and women didn’t write differently?

I gave a talk this week at a law school regarding my article in Written Communication from October 2016, “Gender/Genre: The lack of gendered register in texts requiring genre knowledge.” The article reports the results of an empirical study, but it does so with reference to theories from corpus linguistics and relevance-theoretic pragmatics, not the sort of thing that most law faculty are interested in. Instead, I wanted to emphasize for them the implications of my study in the legal profession and pedagogy and to situate it within a conversation about gender differences more broadly. The article is one voice in a Read More …

My Written Communication article has dropped…

My article in Written Communication is now available online. (The print version comes out next month.) You can read it on the journal’s website only if you have a subscription to the journal. You can read the version I submitted here (not formatted as it appears in the journal, but same content other than a few typo corrections): Gender/Genre: The lack of gendered register in texts requiring genre knowledge You can also contact me directly for a copy of the PDF from the journal (with the official page numbers). Here’s the abstract: Some studies have found characteristics of written texts Read More …