Law and Rhetoric: A Primer

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Benefitting a wide audience, this text introduces rhetorical theory as applied to the law. Aristotle's definition of rhetoric—discovering all the available means of persuasion—encapsulates the benefits of rhetoric to lawyers. We know stories are persuasive, and narrative theory explains why. Law is built on metaphor and analogy. Argument structures are themselves persuasive. Rhetorical sensitivity and the features of the rhetorical situation offer frameworks useful in mediation and in working with clients. Questions of character, form, and structure address the larger questions of justice beyond individual cases and specific statutes.

Students and practicing attorneys will gain insight from this text's rhetorically grounded advice on persuasive techniques drawn from classical rhetoric and contemporary rhetorical theories relating to argumentation, metaphor, analogy, and storytelling. Just as this brief volume brings together teachers and scholars from law and rhetoric, each chapter connects the relevant rhetorical theories and applies them to current legal problems.

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