The latest issue of Academic Questions (Summer 2011: Vol. 24, No. 2) devotes most of its content to legal education. Published by the National Association of Scholars, Academic Questions often features theme issues and invites scholars from across the disciplines to comment on particular concerns about the professoriate. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NAS.) Carol Iannone, editor at large, titles her introduction to the issue “Law School and Other Tyrannies,” and writes that “[w]hat is happening in the law schools has everything to do with the damage and depredation that we see in the legal system at large.” She adds that the contributors to this issue “may not agree on all particulars, but they tell us that all is not well, that law school education is outrageously expensive, heavily politicized, and utterly saturated with ‘diversity’ mania.” What’s more, Iannone submits, law school “fails to provide any grounding in sound legal doctrine, or any moral or ethical basis from which to understand principles of law in debate today.” These are strong words. But are they accurate? I would say yes and no.
Law school education is too expensive, but its costs seem to have risen alongside the costs of university education in general. Whether any university or postgraduate education should cost what it costs today is another matter altogether.
There is little doubt that law schools are “heavily politicized,” as even a cursory glance at the articles in “specialized” law journals would suggest. These journals address anything from gender and race to transnational law and human rights.
But how can law be taught without politicizing? Unlike literature, which does not always immediately implicate politics, law bears a direct relation to politics, or at least to political choices. The problem is not the political topics of legal scholarship and pedagogy so much as it is the lack of sophistication with which these topics are addressed. The problem is that many law professors lack a broad historical perspective and are unable to contextualize their interests within the wider university curriculum or against the subtle trends of intellectual history.
In law journals devoted to gender and feminism, or law journals considered left-wing, you will rarely find articles written by individuals with the intelligence or learning of Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, or Eve Sedgwick. Say what you will about them, these figures are well-read and historically informed. Their writings and theories go far beyond infantile movement politics and everyday partisan advocacy. Read the rest of this entry »
Based on their research of remedial writing programs, Glynda Hull and Mike Rose conclude in “This Wooden Shack Place” that students of writing often offer arguments that at first seem wacky or wrong, but that are actually logical and coherent. These students give unique and insightful interpretations that teachers, fixed in their privileged and heavily conditioned interpretive communities, cannot always realize or appreciate. Hull and Rose treat this student-teacher disjuncture as revealing as much about the teacher as it does about the student. Finally, Hull and Rose conclude that student readings that seem “off the mark” may be “on the mark” depending on where the interpreter—the teacher or student—is coming from or aiming.
Along these lines, Hull and Rose describe “moments of mismatch between what a teacher expects and what students do.” These moments demonstrate that teachers and students come to writing with different values and assumptions shaped by various experiences. Hull and Rose focus on one student, whom they call “Robert,” to substantiate their claims that students respond to literature based on cultural history and background.
Robert and his peers read a poem that Hull and Rose have reproduced in their essay: “And Your Soul Shall Dance for Wakako Yamauchi.” Working together, the student-readers agreed on certain interpretive generalizations but failed to reach consensus about particular lines and meanings. Some students “offered observations that seemed to be a little off the mark, unusual, as though the students weren’t reading the lines carefully.” Robert, a polite boy with a Caribbean background and Los Angeles upbringing, was one of these students. He commented about the poem in a way that troubled Rose—until, that is, Rose pressed Robert about the poem during a student-teacher conference, which Rose recorded. Robert challenged and surprised Rose at this conference by offering a plausible reading, which Rose had not considered. Read the rest of this entry »
The prevailing tendency among some uncritical commentators is to binarize natural law theory and positive law theory as polar opposites. That’s understandable if the terms “natural law” and “positive law” are reduced to cliché. But cliché, although helpful to students first getting introduced to concepts, doesn’t do justice to the complexities and challenges of natural law or positive law jurisprudence. In any event, it is curious that both natural law theorists and positive law theorists claim to have influenced, and to have been influenced by, conservatism. That fact alone suggests that natural law theory and positive law theory are complicated. Here are some readings that will complicate the complicated: Murray Rothbard’s excerpts “Introduction to Natural Law” and “Natural Law versus Positive Law,”F. Russell Hittinger’s short pieces “Natural Law” and “The Rule of Law and Law of Nature,”Robert P. George’s “Witherspoon Lecture,” and Fred Hutchison’s overview “Natural Law and Conservatism.”
News Release: The third volume of The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Bobbie Ann Mason edition, is now for sale at the Shepherd University Book Store (see http://www.shepherdbook.com/). This newest book in the collection presents a selection of stories, essays, poetry, and photographic art, which provide readers with an extraordinary look at the language, storytelling, cultural traditions and heritage of Appalachians—Appalachians working and living in the region today and yesterday.
As with each previous volume, a common center is provided by the literary art and talent of the 2010 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University and recipient of the Heritage Writer’s Award—Kentucky writer Bobbie Ann Mason. Mason’s work brings to literary life the common folk and the everyday working classes—living, learning, and trying to cope and survive in the complex world they find before them.
The book also contains stories by two winners of the 2010 West Virginia Fiction Competition selected by Mason. Mason wrote of Natalie Sypolt’s “Save the Lettuce”: “This is a tight, controlled, powerful story. Nothing is overdone.” Like Mason’s award-winning novel In Country, Sypolt’s short fiction piece is a powerful story about war without the war. Read the rest of this entry »
Last fall, I was assigned to teach a course called “Health & Medicine.” Because I know little about health or medicine, I was concerned. The subject of the course was writing, so I decided to craft a syllabus to facilitate classroom discussion and textual argument. Here is the course description as stated on my syllabus:
Forensic discourse is one of three forms of classical rhetoric as defined by Aristotle. It focuses on the relationship between language and law. This semester we will explore forensic discourse in the context of health and medicine and consider the relationship of law to such issues as physician assisted suicide, surrogacy, cloning, informed consent, malpractice, and organ transplants. Readings on ethics and philosophy will inform the way you think about these issues.
Your grade will not depend on how much you learn about law, but on how you use language to argue about and with law. Because the facts of any case are rarely clear-cut, you will need to understand both sides of every argument. Your writing assignments will require you to argue on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants (or prosecutors and defendants) and to rebut the arguments of opposing counsel. You will develop different tactics for persuading your audience (judges, attorneys, etc.), and you will become skilled in the art of influence.
During the semester, your class will interview one attorney, one judge, and one justice sitting on the Supreme Court of Alabama.
My students came from mostly nursing and pre-medical backgrounds. A few were science majors of some kind, and at least two were engineering majors.
The students were also at varying stages in their academic progress: some were freshmen, some were sophomores, two were juniors, and at least one was a senior. Throughout the semester, I was impressed by students’ ability to extract important issues from dense legal readings and articulate complicated reasoning in nuanced and intelligent ways.
Nicole N. Aljoe has published an intriguing article in Volume 46 (issue no. 2) of Early American Literature (2011), which is published by the University of North Carolina Press. The article is titled “‘Going to Law’: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives.” It is available here on Project Muse. The abstract is below:
Despite the fact that the courts had not proven consistently helpful in their quests for freedom, British West Indian slaves frequently consulted them in order to invoke the rule of law and pursue their rights. Several Caribbean historians have documented the ways in which slaves in the West Indies participated in formal legal arenas almost from the initial days of colonization and claimed the courts as one of their own forums for resolving disputes and asserting those few rights written into the various parliamentary acts intended to ameliorate the conditions of the enslaved and passed in England and its Caribbean colonies from 1788 onward. Indeed, slaves in the West Indies participated in the courts systems as plaintiffs as well as defendants more frequently than previously thought. And although the courts were certainly used by those in power to oppress slaves, women, children, and the poor, as well as to “legitimate [the] blatantly repressive regime” of slavery, they nevertheless provided a forum for those who did not write the laws in question to use the courts to ensure the legal protection of their “natural rights” (Lazarus-Black, “John Grant’s” 154). Thus, in another of the seemingly endless paradoxes inherent to the British imperial slave system, slaves—objects of property, yet human subjects—could, in certain situations, use the courts in the West Indies and in England on their own behalf, as legal agents to affirm their status as legal subjects deserving of the law’s unbiased protection, and judgment.
Directed by George Cukor, the film Adam’s Rib tells the story of Adam (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn), New York attorneys whose marriage smacks of “tough love.” The couple square off when Adam is assigned to prosecute a woman (Judy Holliday) who has attempted to murder her philandering husband—a bumbling dweeb—in the apartment of his mistress. Amanda, who approves of the woman’s act, which she views as resistance to patriarchal society, takes up the case as defense counsel.
Genesis tells us that God fashioned Adam from dust, Eve from Adam’s rib. Adam’s Rib tells a different story.
If anything, Amanda, or “Eve,” is the starting-point—a source of controversy, inspiration, and curiosity. Adam’s Rib isn’t the first production to render gender contests in comedic tones—it’s part of a tradition dating back at least to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew or Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed, and probably much further—but it is one of the more remarkable of all twentieth-century productions, especially in light of Amanda’s advocacy for a doctrine that, in American family law, came to be known as “formal equality.”
What, exactly, does Adam’s Rib offer law students? What does it teach law students, and why should law professors bother with it?
A film that’s in no way after verisimilitude is unlikely to teach law students how to file motions, write briefs, analyze statutes, or bill clients—tasks that we assume are requisite to becoming “good” lawyers. So what’s the point?
In his cunning way, James Elkins, during his Lawyers & Film course that I took in law school, responded to questions of this variety by drawing two boxes on the blackboard: one representing law, the other film.
“We’ve gotta get from this box to this box,” he explained, retracing the diagram with the tip of his chalk. “One place to start,” he suggested, “is with the movie scenes depicting lawyers or the courtroom.” Read the rest of this entry »
We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape life but to find life, to use our minds in fresh, experimental ways, to flex our emotions, to enjoy, to learn, to add depth to our days.
—Robert McKee, from Story
Law school is, in a way, about performing. From the minute you walk into the building as a 1L, you search for and construct a new identity—one that conforms to your assumptions of what a lawyer is and does.
The first time a professor called on me—Mr. Mendenhall, can you tell us how the judge in this case distinguishes restitutionary from reliance damages?—I panicked. I knew the answer. More or less. But I had no chance to rehearse. Here I was, before a large audience, a packed house, all alone, all eyes on me.
“Um, yes,” I stammered, apparently suffering from stage fright.
I don’t remember how I answered—not precisely—but I remember taking a deep breath, feigning confidence, and pretending to know what the professor expected me to know. I must’ve sounded silly talking about things I hardly understood; but I must’ve performed satisfactorily because the professor let me alone and interrogated another student.
Ericson, David F. The Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
“The slavery issue in the antebellum United States was defined centrally by the failure of a people to bear witness to its own liberal principles” (90).
Chapter One
Rhetoric matters, and this book is about the anti- and pro- slavery rhetoric during the antebellum period. Ericson argues that rhetoric separated a nation that was not so “divided against itself” as people assume. Both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric appealed to “liberalism,” according to Ericson, and thus the overall discourse at that time, in this country, under those circumstances, smacked of “liberty” and “equality”: concepts rooted in the mores of Christianity, Republicanism, and discursive pluralism. Today we might lump these concepts into classical liberalism or neo-liberalism, but Ericson suggests that we should not lump concepts the way “consensus scholars” do; rather, he suggests that we accept that liberalism, in all its manifestations, is a complex and multifarious tradition inherited and adapted in many ways and for many purposes. He endorses the approach of “multiple-traditions” scholars that reveals how advocates on both sides of the slavery debate attempted to conform their arguments to the tradition of liberalism.
Chapter Two
Ericson spells out liberalism and distinguishes it from “non-liberal” thought: “I define liberal ideas as a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values. Conversely, nonliberal ideas appeal to some notion of natural inequality based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or birthright that denies those liberal values to significant numbers of human beings” (14). The proslavery liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because slavery was the status in which African Americans could enjoy the most practical liberty in light of their present circumstances, which rendered them incapable of prospering as free men alongside European Americans” (14-15). The antislavery liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied that African Americans were men with a birthright to freedom equal to that of European Americans” (14). The antislavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied African Americans the opportunity to work, worship, and learn at the feet of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). The proslavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because African Americans constituted an inferior race consigned by nature or God to be the slaves of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). Read the rest of this entry »
The old adage “big things come in small packages” has perhaps never been more fitting for an artist than in the case of Jennings, the one-name moniker of New York based siren Mary Jennings.
Standing just a shade over five feet tall, Jennings delivers a robust and heartfelt sound that is anything but small-scale. Her music reflects an enormous strength and drive that is uniquely hers, combining a deep range of rock and pop influences with an unabashed sense of vintage style that few, if any, could ever pull off.
“I believe that the difference between an artist and the average person is a fearless and relentless willingness to expose their quarks, oddities, secrets, and passions for all of the world to see and hear,” says Mary.
Mary’s surge in musical expression started after the sudden death of her mother in 2001. “This tragedy rocked me to the core, but there is so much beauty in what it allowed me to do,” she says. “All of my emotions came pouring out in the form of melody.”
At the time, her father, a former musician himself, gave her the option to go through therapy or record an album. He knew both would be equally helpful to her, but by recording her music, she would be able to have something to hold on to and share with others for a lifetime.
It was on that first album that Jennings established her creative foundation, crafting music that bonds her to the listener in a genuinely honest and relatable way. That openness, and the raw emotion that she has shared on subsequent records, has attracted praise from fans and press alike. “Jennings’ music is sweet, lush, powerful, full of great hooks, intelligent and meaningful to boot! I love it!” said Heather Miller-Rodriguez of 100.1FM KRUU. Platinum award winning producer John Rowe agrees, calling Jennings’s music “creative and original… A breath of fresh air!”
Recent years have seen Mary’s musical aspirations starting to take shape. She has worked with Billboard-charting songwriters, toured with national acts and has had a number of her songs placed on popular television shows. While the professional growth and the accolades are nice, she values most the simple act of connecting with a live audience. “Live performances give me such a rush,” she says. “They are one of the best parts about being a musician. To me, they are what really brings the music to life. To know that you only have a few moments to capture an audience and keep them engaged long enough to fall in love with you and your music is a difficult task, but one that I wouldn’t trade for any other profession.”
Jennings’s growth continues with the release of her latest album, Collapse Collide. It’s a project that reflects an artist, and a woman, who has confidently found her voice over the course of a long, and, at times, heart-breaking journey and the beginning of what many have already predicted: a bright and promising future for a truly one-of-a-kind talent.
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