BiblioVault - Books about Legal Practice

Rhetorical Knowledge in Legal Practice and Critical Legal Theory

Francis J. Mootz III

University of Alabama Press, 2006

A clear summary of contemporary rhetorical philosophy and its intersections with hermeneutics and critical theory

This book describes the significance of rhetorical knowledge for law through detailed discussions of some of the most difficult legal issues facing courts today, including affirmative action, gay rights, and assisted suicide.

Francis J. Mootz responds to both extremes, those who argue that law is merely a rhetorical mask for the exercise of power and those who demonstrate an ideological faith in law’s autonomy, and he breaks new ground by returning to modern classics in the fields of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Drawing from Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric" and Hans-Georg Gadamer's "philosophical hermeneutics," Mootz argues that justice is a product of rhetorical knowledge. Drawing from Nietzsche, Mootz’s conception of rhetorical knowledge opens up the dynamic possibilities of critical legal theory.

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Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe

Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris

Frans Camphuijsen

Amsterdam University Press, 2022

Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice” took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

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Tangled Loyalties

Conflict of Interest in Legal Practice

Susan P. Shapiro

University of Michigan Press, 2002

In Tangled Loyalties, Susan P. Shapiro charts a journey across the state of Illinois. To explore the role of conflict-of-interest in the private practice of law she looks at a wide variety of law firms, including those located near lakes, rivers, and corn fields; in strip malls, storefronts, and historic landmarks; in town squares, residential neighborhoods, deteriorating downtown areas, and glittering high rises.
This unique, empirical study examines the actual attitudes and perceptions of legal practitioners. The author discusses the realities of the profession--what lawyers face day to day, how they deal with conflicts of interest, and how those experiences vary from LaSalle Street to Wall Street to Main Street, from megafirms to solo practices. In describing how conflicts arise in their daily work, Shapiro sheds light on the nature of legal work--on clients, colleagues, law firm power and politics, economics, markets, malpractice insurance, careers, ethics, values, business judgments, and lawyers' most anguishing moments. In short, we learn what it means to be a lawyer at the end of the twentieth century.
Tangled Loyalties also looks at how these conflicts in law affect other fiduciaries--accountants, doctors, psychotherapists, journalists, and academics--and the way in which they respond to competing interests and the honoring of those interests.
Tangled Loyalties will appeal to readers interested in the legal and other professions, social institutions and relations, and issues of trust, ethics, social control and regulation.
Susan P. Shapiro is Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation.

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