Abstract: This presentation will explain an approach to teaching genre forms that focuses on process, rather than product, and on descriptive rather than prescriptive instruction. Traditionally, genre is taught through prescriptive instruction where a scholar of a particular genre (e.g. an appellate brief) gives explicit instructions about the common features of the form. This type of instruction provides comfort to both students and professors because it, arguably, communicates the most amount of information in the least amount of time. But prescriptive instruction tends to focus on near rather than far transfer and therefore may not always be the most effective method for teaching real-world genres. In this presentation, I introduce the “Comparative Genre Analysis,” an assignment developed by a researcher in writing pedagogy, Joanna Wolfe, which I have adapted into a series of small assignments to be deployed in a legal writing classroom. It asks students to create their own “how-to” manuals for how to write memos and briefs in order to practice the skill of learning how to write in a new genre. The objective is to increase far-transfer and give students the skills to apply to the new genres they will be asked to learn in practice.

Abstract: The force of the law comes not only from the way in which language from court opinions engenders assent to it but also from the ways in which legal language can dictate access through a highly formalistic set of rules and potentially inaccessible language and archaic jargon. The legal community is defined through a common education and bar membership but legal education does more than ensure a common knowledge base, it trains us to “think like lawyers” and in doing so, to replicate the practices of thinking and speaking that are entrenched in the law. While this is not a unique feature of a legal discourse community,  it can help to reify linguistic and rhetorical practices that can marginalize outsiders to the law community. 

For my analysis, I have looked at a corpus of hundreds of opinions from three Supreme Court jurisdictions - U.S., Navajo and U.K. - across time to compare linguistic complexity from the past, present and ultimately make predictions about and recommendations for the future. I survey these texts using metrics for the standards of plain language set out in Conn. Gen. Stat. § 42-152 to analyze the extent to which the courts are serving the public through their speech. First, it does so through an analysis of syntactic complexity, as understood both by the statute and using digital tools developed to measure complexity. Second, it analyzes word usage for difficult-to-comprehend words as defined both by the statute and by linguistic tools. I then compare each of the three Courts in terms of the accessibility to the texts by laypeople. I compare these texts across time to account for the trajectory of the language in Supreme Court Opinions. Finally, an analysis is given of the fit of the language of the Plain English statute to give an accurate representation of how accessible a text is. 

Abstract: The presentation will begin with a brief discussion of theories of modality, borrowed from Systemic Functional Linguistics. Next, the panelist will illustrate the instruction and learning process from reading and applying an “easy” statute to muddying the waters with jurisprudence that interprets the statute and sometimes provides a different outcome.  The presentation will focus on the modal language used when applying jurisprudence and/or facts to that statute.  Specifically, she will illustrate the modality of an obligatory statute and then explain how students learn to then apply that statute and write a cogent analysis of the issue using the modality aspects of certainty, probability, or possibility. The final presentation will discuss effective modal language for persuasive documents filed with courts, the difference between the modal language used in those documents as opposed to the that used in office memoranda, teaching students to transition from predictive language used in office memoranda to persuasive language used in documents filed with the court, and the use of objective language in persuasive documents. 

Abstract: Recent popular documentaries and docudramas have brought into question the reliability of confessions. Documentaries like The Central Park Five and Making a Murderer helped to illustrate to a broad audience the fallibility of confessions, be they coerced, compelled, or cajoled. The power of narrative in these instances to shift popular attitudes of police power is clear and direct. The stories narrate the injustices faced in real life by real victims of police overreach and demonstrate the ways in which vulnerabilities can be exploited by investigators trained to elicit confessions. But attention to these cases, cases which are assumed to be rare outliers of a system that usually only extracts confessions from guilty parties, brings into question the law’s assumptions about the reliability of confessions more generally. Without clear empirical evidence about the reliability of confessions, we must extrapolate reliability through our own speculations about what we, ourselves do in a given situation. How could anyone who has never faced a scenario where they were being interrogated about a crime of which they were innocent understand how they would respond to the techniques of police trained in obtaining confessions? This presentation examines one explanation for our presumptions about the relationship between guilt and confessions: our understanding of police interrogations as depicted on police dramas. To do so, I analyze the narrative arc of police interrogations in four of the most watched TV shows of the 2020-21 season, according to Neilson ratings: NCIS, FBI, Blue Bloods and Chicago PD. If, as Paul Ricœur asserts, we understand ourselves in relation to the narrative framework around us, this project can help us to understand how we might understand the interplay of police and suspects through the narratology of police dramas. 

Abstract: In order to understand the interplay between the corpus juris and the interpretation of our codified laws, I study the ways in which privacy law concepts are encoded 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, unsurprisingly, specific prior texts command a large proportion of the legal opinions. What is surprising is the way in which prior utterances are framed and used for different rhetorical purposes. 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