"From the twin birth of western rhetoric and law in the Greek-speaking world in the first millennium BCE, law and rhetoric were deeply connected in the ancient world. In the modern era of legal practice, the clear connections between law and classical rhetoric have largely been lost to both those trained in the law and those who study rhetoric. This interdisciplinary reader reestablishes those lost connections by pairing primary source materials in classical rhetoric and contemporary law. The chapters in this volume show that ancient rhetorical texts can deepen or disrupt contemporary notions about principles that lie at the root of western legal traditions and return to us our past, making it possible for scholars across several disciplines to build on work accomplished centuries before. Broken into four parts, this volume first covers the historical development of rhetoric. In Part Two, volume editor Mootz and scholar David A. Frank look at rhetorical theorists at "bookends" of an era when classical rhetoric was de-valued as a mode of thought. Mootz discusses the hegemonic wave of Enlightenment epistemology that separated law from rhetoric, and Frank shows that where Cartesian rationality fails in the modern era, the humanistic tradition of rhetoric allows law to respond to the needs of justice. Part Three consists of ten chapters that each (1) introduce a classical rhetorical theorist to the reader, (2) provide an excerpt from a text by that theorist, and then (3) demonstrate the relevance of that work to a contemporary court case. Moving from the Sophists, through Aristotle and Plato and their Greek contemporaries, to the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian, and finally, to the early medieval rhetorician, St. Augustine, these reprinted classical texts are contextualized by leading scholars in law, classics, and rhetoric, each with probing discussion questions for readers to engage and interact with the materials rhetorically. This vital resource of primary texts demonstrates how rhetoric illuminates the operation of the legal system and reconnects law to its rhetorical roots. Structured for use by scholars in critical inquiry and well suited for use in graduate or law school courses, Classical Rhetoric and Contemporary Law will be of interest to law, rhetoric, English, and communication scholars, and as an interactive catalyst to examine the ways in which ancient rhetorical theory informs our understanding of law practice today"--

Cicero and Modern Law contains the best modern writings on Cicero's major law related works, such as the Republic, On Law, On Oratory, along with a comprehensive bibliography of writings on Cicero's legal works. These works are organized to reveal the influence of Cicero's writings upon the history of legal thought, including St. Thomas, the Renaissance, Montesquieu and the U.S. Founding Fathers. Finally, the articles include discussions of Cicero's influence upon central themes in modern lega thought, including legal skepticism, republicanism, mixed government, private property, natural law, conservatism and rhetoric. The editor offers an extensive introduction, placing these articles in the context of an overall view of Cicero's contribution to modern legal thinking.

Lawyers, law students and their teachers all too frequently overlook the most comprehensive, adaptable and practical analysis of legal discourse ever devised: the classical art of rhetoric. Classical analysis of legal reasoning, methods and strategy is the foundation and source for most modern theories on the topic. Beginning with Aristotle's Rhetoric and culminating with Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Greek and Roman rhetoricians created a clear, experience-based theoretical framework for analyzing legal discourse. This book is the first to systematically examine the connections between classical rhetoric and modern legal discourse. It traces the history of legal rhetoric from the classical period to the present day and shows how modern theorists have unknowingly benefited from the classical works. It also applies classical rhetorical principles to modern appellate briefs and judicial opinions to demonstrate how a greater familiarity with the classical sources can deepen our understanding of legal reasoning.

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? This collection of 11 essays takes a diachronic approach to address these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse.

Classical rhetorical techniques can enhance the persuasiveness of Supreme Court opinions by making their language clear, lively, and memorable. This book focuses on three techniques—“invention” (creation of arguments), “arrangement” (organization), and “style” (word choice)—in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, respectively. The justices featured here contributed to the Court’s rhetorical legacy in different ways, but all five rejected the magisterial opinion style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in favor of a more personal and conversational format. As a result, their opinions have endured, and even modern readers who cannot recall the justices’ names understand and embrace the ideas expressed in their legal writings and apply those ideas to current debates. Practicing lawyers, professors, and students can use this book to study legal writing techniques and make their own writing more persuasive.

St. Augustine and Roman law are the two bridges from Athens and Jerusalem to the world of modern law. Augustine's almost eerily modern political realism was based upon his deep appreciation of human evil, arising from his insights into the human personality, the product of his reflections on his own life and the history of his times. These insights have traveled well through the ages and are mirrored in the pages of Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt. The articles in this volume describe the life and world of Augustine and the ways in which he conceived both justice and law. They also discuss the little recognized Augustinian contributions to the field of modern hermeneutics - the discipline which informs the art of legal interpretation. Finally, they include Augustine's valuable discussion of church/state relations, the law of just wars, and proper role and limits of coercion, and the procreative dimensions of marriage. The volume also includes an extremely useful, definitive bibliography of Augustine and the law, and will leave readers with an increased appreciation of the contributions which Augustine has made to the history of jurisprudence. No one can read Augustine and these articles on his view of the law without taking away a new view of the law itself.

This book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.

Better writing, one case at a time. Professors of legal writing, rhetoric, and technical writing, Katie Guest Pryal and Jordynn Jack have created a manual for improving all stages of the legal writing process, from the invention of strong legal arguments to the crafting of eloquence and style.

This multi-authored volume, by an authoritative team of international scholars, examines the transmission of Ciceronian rhetoric in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, concentrating on the fortunes, in particular, of the two dominant classical rhetorical textbooks of the time, Cicero’s early De inventione, and the contemporary ‘pseudo-Ciceronian’ Rhetorica ad Herennium. The volume is unprecedented in range and depth as a presentation of the place of classical rhetoric in medieval culture, and will serve to revise views of a period seen until recently as largely indifferent to the values of ‘eloquence’. The main body of the volume is composed of a series of ground-breaking studies of the relationship between Ciceronian rhetoric and a wide range of intellectual traditions and cultural practices, including dialectic, law, conduct theory, memory, poetics and practical composition teaching, preaching, ars dictaminis, and political oratory. Also included are important contextualizing essays on the commentary tradition of the Ciceronian juvenilia, on the textual history and manuscript transmission of Cicero’s rhetorical works, and on the Latin and vernacular traditions of Ciceronian rhetoric in Italy. The volume concludes with an annotated appendix of illustrative texts containing extracts from the commentary tradition on Ciceronian rhetoric, most of which have not been previously available in print.

The art of persuasion, as practised today in political debate as well as in the courts of law, has been developed in the rhetorical tradition, but its authors have disappeared from view. One of them was Quintilian, who wrote his Institutio oratoria at the end of the first century AD. This book is special because it contains one of the fullest surveys of rhetorical insights ever written and because it has come down to us in its entirety. Quintilian's rhetorical system has been used in teaching rhetoric at universities since the Middle Ages. The purpose of 'Quintilian and the Law' is to reintroduce Quintilian's Institutio oratoria to modern readers, and to show that the topics discussed in it are still very much alive today. To that end, modern experts of law and rhetoric present their views on the Institutio oratoria, each dealing with one of the twelve books of which it consists. The authors were free to choose their own way of working, so that some books are described in their entirety, others are discussed from one particular point of view, and others still are treated only with regard to a particular section. In Roman times, the shortest way to a political career was by working in the law courts. There, one could acquire a reputation for having a thorough knowledge of the law and for being able to speak well in public. In his Institutio oratoria, Quintilian not only formulated important insights in juridical argumentation, in the art of speech-writing, and in the performative aspects of advocacy, he also discussed the ethical problems involved. Because Quintilian larded his instructions with numerous examples from practice, his book takes us back into the Roman law courts and helps us experience their exciting atmosphere. The essays in this book reflect the wide range of subjects discussed by Quintilian. They deal with (one of) six themes: (1) the ideal orator in a historical perspective, (2) his education, (3) rhetoric and communication, (4) argumentation, (5) Roman law in the Institutio oratoria, and (6) emotions in the courtroom. However, in honour of its author, they are arranged in the order of the Institutio oratoria.