Current Research

Accepted for Publication: Cambridge University Press.

The syllogism is at the heart of legal reasoning. So foundational is this concept that Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner argue that “the most rigorous form of logic, and hence the most persuasive, is the syllogism.”  Legal scholars share examples of syllogism from Aristotle  to demonstrate proper syllogistic logic and proscribe the boundaries of rational legal reasoning. And yet, Aristotle would not recognize typical legal arguments as syllogistic. 

Rather than syllogistic, legal language can be better understood as enthymematic.  A seemingly insignificant distinction, the difference has vast consequences for the way we understand the way courts reason and the process through which common law is made. Enthymemes are perhaps the most important rhetorical device available to forensic rhetors. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle equated them to rhetoric itself, proclaiming that “enthymemes […] are the substance of rhetorical persuasion” (Aristotle Book I). He concludes that enthymemes are “rhetorical syllogisms” because they are the rhetorical corollary to the scientific syllogism. Where scientific syllogisms begin with known truths about the nature of the world, legal enthymemes begin with commonly held beliefs and assumptions. Enthymemes necessarily operate in the realm of forensic and deliberative oratory because of the continent nature of humanistic truths. 

And yet, despite the important distinctions between syllogisms and enthymemes, the enthymematic structure of legal arguments is not well understood or studied. This chapter examines two recent Fourth Amendment Supreme Court privacy law cases, United States v. Jones (2012) and Carpenter v. United States (2018) through the lens of Aristotle’s Rhetoric  books I and II and his treatment of the enthymeme. The paper ultimately argues that the enthymematic structure of legal reasoning has profound effects on the logic and rhetoric of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that cannot be fully understood through the traditional paradigm of the legal syllogism. It examines alternative hypotheses and starting points to legal reasoning by analogy and explores the effect that adopting an alternative starting point has on the trajectory of the law. 

This article explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically generative AI (GAI), and the legal profession, offering a unique perspective grounded in the author's expertise in machine learning and corpus linguistics. The primary objective is to elucidate the operational mechanisms of GAI, drawing on machine learning principles and corpus linguistics to demystify how these systems process and generate language-based outputs. This technical foundation paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ethical implications inherent in the adoption of AI technologies by legal practitioners. The article examines the potential challenges and opportunities presented by AI, including issues of bias, transparency, and the evolving nature of legal responsibilities. Furthermore, it proposes a framework for the responsible incorporation of AI into legal practice, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that leverages the benefits of AI while mitigating its risks. This framework is designed to guide lawyers in making informed decisions about the use of AI tools, ensuring adherence to ethical standards and professional responsibilities. The article contributes to the ongoing discourse on AI in the legal field by providing actionable insights and fostering a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics at play in the integration of advanced technologies into legal practice. 

Explains recent developments in WAC/WID and Professional Writing that can help us teach genre in a way that promotes far transfer. 

The growing body of work in legal rhetoric and linguistics highlights the increased awareness of the importance of legal rhetorical analysis. But both discourse analysts and legal scholars have been too limited in their fields of study to adequately address important research questions and that scholars are not currently using valuable interdisciplinary tools to answer larger questions that affect each field individually. 

In order to understand the interplay between the corpus juris and the interpretation of our codified laws, I study the way in which privacy law concepts are entexulated in a line of Supreme Court privacy law opinions. Using theories of entextualization, or “the process of rendering a given instance of discourse a text, detachable from its local context” (Urban), this paper analyzes instances of intertextuality in three Supreme Court privacy law cases, and finds that specific prior texts command a large proportion of the legal opinions. The opinions make extensive use of direct quotations, citation of prior cases and reference to legal concepts derived from prior case law and legal scholarship. To analyze how a text is entextualized, the paper tracks the way in which the Fourth Amendment is taken up variously as a text, a concept, and a law through the examination of the context surrounding its use and finds that the Court engages “The Fourth Amendment” to different ends to justify its reasoning in the instant case.

Book Review: Franz-Willem Korsten’s Art as an Interface of Law and Justice