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Law & Humanities Blog

Legal Writing and Legal Education
Bad Is Good
The Cultural Study of Law and Lawyers
A Recommended Reading List

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 03:21 PM PDT

Erika Abner, Postgraduate Medical Education Office, and Shelley M. Kierstaed, Osgoode Hall Law School, have published Text Work as Identity Work for Legal Writers. Here is the abstract.

The authors conduct a conduct analysis of a number of first year and practitioner legal writing texts in order to examine whether and how these texts focus on the development of a legal identity; in particular, through creation of a personal, professional, or discoursal voice. The question of creation of a legal identity is significant, in part, because of the increased focus on teaching and learning professionalism and professional behaviors, both within law schools and in practice. The authors conclude that there is a limited focus within the texts on the identity work inherent in learning to write with authority under conditions of uncertainty. The social practice of writing tends to be under-emphasized.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Bad Is Good

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 01:16 PM PDT

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Kudos to Sue Fondrie, of the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, whose immortal (?) sentence "Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories" wins her this year's first prize in the Annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Want more giftedly bad writing? Check out this year's winning entries here.

Winner in the Crime Section

Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler--who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne--or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he'd have to stop and smell the Roses.

Mark Wisnewski, Flanders, NJ

Runner-Up:

Five minutes before his scheduled execution, Kip found his thoughts turning to his childhood-- all those years ago before he had become a contract killer whose secret weakness was a severe peanut allergy, even back before he lost half of a toe in a gardening accident while doing community service-- but especially to Corinne, the pretty girl down the street whom he might have ended up marrying one day if she had only shown him a little more damn respect.

Andrew Baker, Highland Park, NJ

Dishonorable Mention:

The victim was a short man, with a face full of contradictions: amalgam, composite, dental porcelain, with both precious and non-precious metals all competing for space in a mouth that was open, bloody, terrifying, gaping, exposing a clean set of asymptomatic impacted wisdom teeth, but clearly the object of some very comprehensive dental care, thought Dirk Graply, world-famous womanizer, tough guy, detective, and former dentist.

Basil McDonnell, Vancouver, BC

The Cultural Study of Law and Lawyers

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 09:21 AM PDT

Rakesh K. Anand, Syracuse University College of Law, has published Advancing the Cultural Study of the Lawyer: Developing Three Philosophical Claims and Introducing a New Comparative Normative Inquiry at 3 Washington University Jurisprudence Review 107 (2010). Here is the abstract.

In America, law is a cultural practice, a type of social activity that generates a complete world of meaning. As such, it makes behavioral demands on those who participate in its form of experience. That is, it requires that those who take up its way of life act in certain ways. This fact -that law has an innate normativity, or an inherent ethics - is the organizing principle of the cultural study of the lawyer, a project that considers the implications of this condition for our thinking about law and about the work of law's most representative figures, namely lawyers. This Article builds upon previous writing in the project and pursues two natural consequent lines of inquiry. First, it provides a more detailed account of three philosophical claims that the cultural study of the lawyer has made, either explicitly or implicitly, the purpose of which is to clarify certain intellectual positions of the project. Second, moving forward from the cultural study of the lawyer's earlier exploration of how, at the most basic level, the behavioral demands of law differ from those associated with the moral form of experience, this Article begins a parallel discourse, reflecting on the behavioral demands of law and those of the cultural practice of economics, again specifically focusing on fundamental principles and their differential character. As with the earlier consideration of legal and moral prescription, the aim of this analysis is to make clear the distinction between the two cultural practices' requirements on conduct - an analysis that in turn shows that, at his or her core, a lawyer is not an economic person (and therefore not a businessperson). Because the cultural study of the lawyer may be unfamiliar to some, this Article begins with an overview of the project, emphasizing in particular its intellectual setting and genealogy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Recommended Reading List

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 09:03 AM PDT

In the ABA Journal's current issue, 30 Lawyers Pick 30 Books Every Lawyer Should Read.