Recht als Gegenstand rhetorischer Grundlagenforschung

According to the self-image of lawyers, jurisprudence is a science: the premises in legal conclusions are truth-apt, as are the conclusions or judgements that follow from them, the cognition of true law is consequently regarded as their task. Against this background, a program that understands and analyzes law as the product of a rhetorical practice is confronted with fierce resistance. According to the research of analytical legal rhetoric, on the other hand, the evidence for a rhetorical imprint on law is overwhelming: starting with the logical status of legal inferences, to the peculiarities of judicial procedure, to the motivational situation of those involved in it, everywhere it becomes apparent that the image of strict truth-orientation inadequately describes the genesis of law. Following Aristotle, who assigned law to the field of phrónēsis and not to epistēmē, contemporary legal rhetoric research aims to draw a realistic picture of the genesis of law. Subdivided into the triad of logos, ethos, and pathos, it attempts to fully grasp the interrelationships involved. It becomes apparent that the rational or argumentative dimension is far from dominating in legal justifications. It is precisely at the neuralgic point, i.e., where arguments are opposed to each other, that the rhetor typically uses a rhetorical figure that links all levels of the triad: the restrictio.

Vision and Decision

The rhetorical formula ‘law and literature’ places law before literature while the usually conjunctive ‘and’ connotes hierarchy and disjunction rather than equality and encounter. The concept of jurisliterature provides a lexical and theoretical remedy for such alienation and non-recognition. In the era of imaginal law and the politicization of common law practices through viral relay and online video presence the spectacle of governance becomes the governance of spectacles. Vision increasingly determines decision. Using the example of a recent four-part documentary trial, Woody Allen v Mia Farrow, this article examines the stakes of imaginal law, and the consequences of a juridism set free from the archive.

Was sagt uns ein Gesetz?

What kind of rhetoric does a statute present? In the following essay, you will find, after the introduction (1.), the answer in studying interpretants (2.). When you look at written law, you find at least four different types: the academic Roman today antecedent (3.a), the modern blanket clause of the police (3.b), the constitutional clauses which date from the same time (3.c), and finally the last post-modern product as a type of rule which determines the legal form itself (3.d). With tables of measures, figures, and clauses of discretion, it attempts to suppress the disturbance of interpretants (4.).

Perspective Taking als Methode zur kommunikativen Kom­pe­tenz­entwicklung im Jurastudium

Although lawyers and judges often face communicative challenges in their everyday work, communicative skills are hardly trained in legal education. Based on the interdisciplinary project „Law and Rhetoric“ at the University of Tübingen, the paper highlights addressee-oriented communication and perspective-taking as central aspects of communicative competence. Through addressee orientation and the development of the ability to adopt perspectives, students are given the opportunity to think through communicative situations systematically and to anticipate communicative resistances. In contrast, the widespread focus on performance in the field of rhetorical key qualifications in legal educations only allows a restricted growth of communication skills and does not reach far enough.

Law and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece and Today

This paper examines the interaction of law and rhetoric in classical Athens and in current US common law. I argue that there is an inevitable tension between rhetoric, which operates with words (Greek logoi), and law, which supposedly deals with facts (Greek erga) but necessarily works also with words. The Greeks understood this tension and accepted it, whereas today we often try to deny it, though recent work in the field of Law and Literature has done much to illuminate the operation of rhetoric in law today.