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Archive for the ‘Legal Education & Pedagogy’ Category

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Legal Research & Writing, Audience, and Cross-disciplinarity

In Communication, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on September 6, 2010 at 9:21 pm

Richard L. Larson interrogates the concept of the research paper. He submits that this term (“research paper”) lacks settled meaning because it “has no conceptual or substantive identity” (218). He calls the term “generic” and “cross-disciplinary” and claims that it “has virtually no value as an identification of a kind of substance in a paper” (218).

Despite its ever-shifting meaning, the term “research paper” persists both inside and outside English Departments, both among faculty and among students, at both university and secondary school levels. The problem for Larson is that by perpetuating the use of this slippery signifier, writing instructors mislead students about what constitutes research and thereby enable bad student research.

The term research paper “implicitly equates ‘research’ with looking up books in the library and taking down information from those books” (218), so students learning to write so-called research papers inadvertently narrow their research possibilities by relying on this narrow conception of research as library visitation, cursory note-taking, and so on, without recognition of alternate forms of research that may be more discipline-appropriate: interviews, field observations, etc. (218).

Furthermore, using the term “research paper” to describe a particular type of activity implies not only that other, suitable practices are not in fact “research,” but also that students may dispense with elements of logic and intertextuality and citation because instructors didn’t refer to those things as elements of research papers.

Research papers, properly understood, teach skills that apply to all papers. In a way, all papers are research papers if they draw from sustained observation or studied experience. Read the rest of this entry »

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Discourse and Legal Writing Instructors

In Communication, Information Design, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Literary Theory & Criticism, Rhetoric & Communication on August 28, 2010 at 12:05 pm

My writing instructors in law school parroted a line that I considered both annoying and at times wrong:  “This is bad writing.”  The criteria for what constituted bad (as opposed to good) writing had to do, invariably, with rigid rules of grammar and syntax.  A sentence was “bad,” for example, if it failed to have a comma following an introductory prepositional phrase; or a sentence was good, even if it sounded awkward, so long as it did not violate any rule of basic grammar.  Such over-commitment to formalism quashed any sense of experimentation or creativity that the students might have had.  Rather than trying out new styles and syntaxes, students confined their writing to short, plain statements of fact and conclusion.  Their papers read like boring how-to manuals: monotone and tedious, never lively and engaging.  The problem, as I see it, is that legal writing instructors have little awareness of audience.  They simply have no notion of what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities” and so have no notion of genre (categories of discourse) or performative text (text that mimics or signals certain categories of discourse).  Legal writing instructors locate students within a field of discourse akin to technical writing, but they never explain to students why technical writing is appropriate or even desirable in a legal context.  Instead, they inform students that anything that is not technical writing is bad, and they do so without realizing that different communities may have different expectations or prefer different techniques and vocabularies.  Legal writing instructors never explain that certain modes of writing can be good in other contexts but instead treat all writing as belonging to one classificatory scheme.  They force writing into one of two categories—good or bad—without regard to the quality of writing as contextualized in other communities.  Such habits simply will not do.      Read the rest of this entry »

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Constructing Tony Montana, Scarface

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Film, Information Design, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Scarface, Semiotics on August 12, 2010 at 4:17 pm

Brian de Palma’s Scarface (1983) adopts and adapts several conventions of the gangster genre that feature prominently as icons on posters and in trailers for the film.

These conventions constitute and perpetuate the narrative image of “gangster” that audiences have come to expect from gangster films.  Big guns, flashy jewels, impeccable suits, sexy women—these are the signifiers de Palma employs as semantics of the gangster genre.  They summon forth ideas of “the gangster” before audiences ever see the film.

Scarface is a remake of another gangster film.  Viewers who are unaware of this fact will nevertheless recognize the gangster signs and symbols used to market it.  Tony Montana’s image remains popular today, some twenty-seven years after the film’s production.  Scarface has become a lasting contribution to our national culture.       Read the rest of this entry »

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Review of John Ernest’s Chaotic Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Dred Scott, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism on July 7, 2010 at 2:30 pm

 

John Ernest, Eberly Distinguished Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University, has written a new book, Chaotic Justice, that should appeal to lawyers and law professors alike.  Ernest’s project began with basic research on Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), but over time Ernest realized that, in his words, “I did not know nearly enough about the literary and cultural history on which, according to my doctorate and professional experience, I was supposed to be an expert.”  Ernest found himself “increasingly convinced that we cannot appreciate American literary and cultural history without a deep understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature,” so he set out to gain that understanding and to convey his findings to a wide audience.  Some of the articles he published along the way—in such journals as PMLA, African American Review, American Literature, and Arizona Quarterly—appear in the book, albeit in slightly different form.   

Examining a vast network of authors who shaped the African American literary corpus, Ernest, a critical race theorist, has strong words for those who teach histories and theories about race as a nod toward idealized multiculturalism.  “Too often,” he says, “social progress relating to race is considered to be an approach toward an imagined horizon by which either the color line gradually disappears or an imagined multiculturalist ideal emerges—an escape, in effect, from a social world largely constructed by and long devoted to racial theories and racist practices.”  More harm than good, in other words, will come of a curriculum that celebrates a quixotic post-racial future while overlooking—or, worse, generalizing—about America’s fraught history of racism.      Read the rest of this entry »

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Shakespeare and Forster

In Arts & Letters, E.M. Forster, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Shakespeare on June 17, 2010 at 3:35 pm

On SSRN, I’ve posted abstracts for articles on E.M. Forster and William Shakespeare.  The Forster abstract is available here. The Shakespeare abstract is available here.


The Dred Scott Decision

In Arts & Letters, Dred Scott, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, The Supreme Court on June 16, 2010 at 10:08 pm

My paper on the Dred Scott decision is available on SSRN.  Click here to view the abstract and then click “One-click Download” to read the paper.

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Michael Blumenthal, Country of the Second Chance

In Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy on May 12, 2010 at 5:48 pm

Listen to Michael Blumenthal, novelist, poet, translator, and now law professor, as he muses about life, America, and growing older: West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

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A Defense of Law-and-Literature

In Arts & Letters, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism on May 7, 2010 at 2:58 pm

“Why study literature in professional school?” people have asked when I said that I work in a discipline called law-and-literature. I usually reply, “For the same reason we study math from elementary school until college: to learn about ‘truth.’”

The concept of “truth” has become the subject of ridicule. The postmodern era of scholarship, with its roots in poststructuralism, deconstruction, and narratology, ushered in new conceptions of metaphysics and ontology: all texts, indeed all things emanating from texts, whether cultural norms or social values, are at variance with themselves. Nothing has essential meaning; everything is indeterminate and arbitrary. The self-evident “meaning” perceived by individuals is socially constructed, having been centered or passed down through networks of people and events. These, at any rate, are the simplistic accusations put forth by those fed up with postmodernist presuppositions.

I’m no enemy of postmodernism, but I tend to agree with French theorist Bruno Latour, who claims that we have never been modern, so we cannot have been postmodern, and besides, there is something to this concept of “truth.”  Why else would we have mathematics? Mathematics, like literature, has the capacity to bring about answers. True answers. Postmodernism has never quite debunked this truth-seeking field. Read the rest of this entry »

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Michael Blumenthal

In Arts & Letters, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Michael Blumenthal on April 29, 2010 at 10:43 pm

Having held the Copenhaver Chair at West Virginia University College of Law for two semesters, Michael Blumenthal will remain in Morgantown for another academic year.  Blumenthal is a lawyer, poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and translator.  See my article about Blumenthal here.

Professor James R. Elkins, editor of The Legal Studies Forum, was instrumental in bringing Blumenthal from Old Dominion University, where Blumenthal held an endowed chair, to West Virgina University.