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by Kathleen A. Tarr*

“If I were a woman,” I continued, fully immersed in the logic of my argument. “You are a woman,” he reminded me. “Oh, yes.” I can’t remember what we had been discussing, two college students intellectualizing on our way out of the gym, me raised in a home with a father I idolized who in turn idolized S’chn T’gai Spock Cha’ Sarek[1] (a.k.a, Spock); logic was (is) my God. That I neglected my own demographics during a discussion was therefore not surprising, but it was . . . well, odd.

Continue reading “Logic and Its Discontents: Jurisprudential Tensions Between Emotion and Reason” →

by Andrew Jensen Kerr*

The only way to be a friend is to have one – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Coercing Friendship and the Problem with Human Rights (PDF Version)

 I argue in this short essay that the foundational language of “dignity” in international human rights doctrine obscures the actual construction of human rights and limits high-functioning animals from our moral community. This lexicon of dignity lacks discrete content, but it has been almost uniformly interpreted to signal something unique about humans or the human condition. Indeed, the trending People ex rel. Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery appellate decision from New York reflects how a narrow vision of rights jurisprudence determines practical life outcomes for animals like Tommy (a chimpanzee). I use the prism of friendship to explore how the (awkward) provision of essential emotional goods might subvert reader expectations of how we think about legal distinctions between humans and other animals.  The motivating question that informs this essay is thus: should there be a positive right to friendship? Continue reading “Coercing Friendship and the Problem with Human Rights” →

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By Michael D. Murray*

Introduction

A. Accommodating Multiculturalism in Legal Education and Law Practice by Using Visual Techniques

Legal education and law practice presents law professors and attorneys with the task of communicating the law to increasingly large audiences of LL.M. and J.D. students, clients, jurors, and other decision makers who are not native English speakers and do not share the same culture, history, or social context of those who traditionally dominated law school classrooms in the United States.[1] This is not an insignificant observation, because most of rhetoric[2]—which is to say, communication[3]—depends on understanding language,[4] narratives,[5] sense-memories and their effect on the interpretation of metaphors,[6] and archetypes[7] to construct knowledge and that will lead to persuasion or to mastery of the information. The methods of instruction and argumentation designed for traditional, mainstream audiences and the verbal-oriented conceptions of rhetoric and narrative reasoning that support these methods will be less effective when used to communicate with the new, diverse, and multicultural audiences in law school and legal practice.[8] The choices are to stay the course or take on the new challenge by bridging the gaps in communication. Continue reading “Leaping Language and Cultural Barriers with Visual Legal Rhetoric†” →