Friday, November 18, 2016

Sarat, ed., "Rhetorical Processes and Legal Judgments"

We missed this edited collection from Cambridge University Press when it first came out (August 2016): Rhetorical Processes and Legal Judgments: How Language and Arguments Shape Struggles for Rights and Power, edited by Austin Sarat (Amherst), with contributions by Christopher Schmidt (IIT Chicago-Kent) and Bernadette Meyler (Stanford University), among others. A description from the Press:
Over the last several decades legal scholars have plumbed law's rhetorical life. Scholars have done so under various rubrics, with law and literature being among the most fruitful venues for the exploration of law's rhetoric and the way rhetoric shapes law. Today, new approaches are shaping this exploration. Among the most important of these approaches is the turn toward history and toward what might be called an 'embedded' analysis of rhetoric in law. Historical and embedded approaches locate that analysis in particular contexts, seeking to draw our attention to how the rhetorical dimensions of legal life works in those contexts. Rhetorical Processes and Legal Judgments seeks to advance that mode of analysis and also to contribute to the understanding of the rhetorical structure of judicial arguments and opinions.
More information is available here.