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To skip the BS and go straight to the download, click here: https://www.rhetoricked.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Legal-Argumentation-fall-2020-ed.-FINAL.pdf OK, who needs another legal writing textbook? Absolutely no one, except me. I love Chris Coughlin, Joan Rocklin, and Sandy Patrick’s A Lawyer Writes (3d ed.), but it does not do some things exactly how I want them done, and it does not do some other things at all. As textbooks go, it’s not expensive, but it is another $50-60 out of students’ pockets. And I would prefer students to have an electronic text, simply because it means fewer books to carry around (though they may very well Read More …

Updated June 19, 2020, to include link to video of second Zoom session and bibliographic essay; May 29, 2020, to indicate time of June 9 meeting After the wonderful demo that Professor Tracy Norton (Touro Law) provided of online peer-review tool Peerceptiv in early May, I thought it would be helpful for teachers of legal communication to see a demo of another tool, Eli Review, that I’ve used with first-year law students for the last three years at Texas A&M University. (Videos of the Zooms Professor Norton held before and after the demo are available here and here.) The Peerceptiv Read More …

This post provides the presentation slides and my notes from a talk at the University of Wisconsin Law School on March 4, 2020. To download the PDF, click this link.

Each fall in my Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing class, I split students into teams, each comprising four or five students, and have them compete to prepare citations that are correct according to the Bluebook (or the ALWD Guide, depending on your proclivities–I check to be sure they are consistent). They compete in relay races, two teams at a time, weekly during the semester. In the last couple weeks of the semester, we have playoffs and crown each section’s winning team. Well… we do not exactly crown them. Instead, they get their names engraved on the coveted “Citation Cup,” pictured Read More …

(Lightly edited March 21, 2022, to correct mechanical errors; featured image “Love Kitty” Copyright 2013 Mark McNestry CC license) by  Brian N. Larson & Olivia J. Countryman There has been a great deal of conversation in recent months and years about the appropriate pronouns to use when referring to folks. Merriam-Webster in 2019 added the singular-pronoun function to its definition of `they.’[1] The question of pronoun use arises most frequently in the context of transgender and gender non-binary persons. Chances are, if you are of a certain age, much of this sounds a bit confusing: You are perhaps too old Read More …

Many colleagues have been at the forefront of organizing and planning the Nevada Law Journal symposium “Classical Rhetoric as a Lens for Contemporary Legal Praxis,” being held at William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, September 26-28, 2019, (info and free registration link here) particularly the co-chairs of the symposium, Professors Lori D. Johnson (UNLV) and Susan E. Provenzano (Northwestern). My colleague Prof. Angela Morrison at Texas A&M has been a leader, too, and recently sent out an update to the mailing lists, inviting attendance. Here, I want to add my own argument about why professors and Read More …

Updated August 21, 2019, to provide a link to the final course pack. (You should download and refer to the course pack from now on. You should consider discarding previous versions of the course pack to avoid confusing yourself about dates, etc.) The final course pack is now available on the TWEN site for the course. I’m providing only a link to it there to encourage you to connect to TWEN. If you have questions after reviewing these materials, please feel free to contact me via email, or post a comment on this page (as it will help others who Read More …

Classical Rhetoric as a Lens for Contemporary Legal Praxis is a symposium of the Nevada Law Journal on September 26 & 27, 2019. Lori Johnson, associate professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Susan Provenzano, William Trumbull Professor of Practice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, are the chairs/organizers of the conference. They are also pleased to announce a workshop to follow the symposium on September 28. The workshop seeks proposals from scholars with works in progress (WIPs) that explore the intersections of classical rhetoric (broadly defined) and contemporary law. Read More …