| Description |
1 online resource (241 pages) |
| Series |
Law, language and communication |
|
Law, language and communication.
|
| Contents |
Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Three ways of reading a term -- 1.1 The big day -- 1.2 The old school -- 1.2.1 The professors: the wordsmith's fallacy -- 1.2.2 The students: opinions as instruments -- 1.3 The new old school: terms as units -- 1.3.1 The statistics, authorship, and content -- 1.3.2 SCOTUSblog and professional accounts of the term -- 1.4 A fresh look at opinion content -- 1.4.1 Why content matters -- 1.4.2 What kind of content? Language, ontology, mind -- 1.4.2.1 Law and literature -- 1.4.2.2 Philosophy of legal language -- 1.4.2.3 Legal cognition -- 1.5 Plan of the book -- 2 Fear of fiction -- 2.1 Before post-truth -- 2.2 The many faces of "fiction" -- 2.2.1 Traditional legal fictions -- 2.2.2 "Fiction" as epithet -- 2.2.3 Taking fiction seriously -- 2.2.3.1 Accounting for fiction through the twentieth century -- 2.2.3.2 Contemporary views -- 2.2.4 Some pitfalls of a simplified view -- 2.3 The many functions of fact -- 2.3.1 Fact as foundation, field, and force -- 2.3.2 Adjudicative, legislative, and metalinguistic fact -- 2.3.3 The grounding of fact -- 2.3.4 Discounting facts -- 2.4 Fact and its foils -- 2.4.1 Fact versus opinion (and law versus morals) -- 2.4.2 Fact versus law -- 2.4.3 The facts of law -- 2.5 Double talk -- 3 Real people, fictional characters, legal phantoms -- 3.1 Writing minds into being -- 3.2 Real people and true believers -- 3.2.1 The legal logic of the intentional stance -- 3.2.2 Judicial mindreading -- 3.2.2.1 Criminal mens rea -- 3.2.2.2 Discriminatory intent -- 3.3 There's more to say about mental states -- 3.3.1 Reading fictional minds -- 3.3.2 Preserves of subjectivity -- 3.3.3 Dangerous tools -- 3.4 Legal phantoms -- 3.4.1 The range of the reasonable -- 3.4.2 Reducing reasonableness -- 3.4.3 How to make a perspective objective |
|
3.5 Thought control -- 4 Big personalities -- 4.1 Plural minds -- 4.2 Judicial character -- 4.2.1 The "Supreme Wand" -- 4.2.1.1 Panels as people -- 4.2.1.2 Judicial role play -- 4.2.2 The "impetuous vortex" -- 4.2.2.1 What Congress wants -- 4.2.2.2 What is a legislature? -- 4.3 Groups outside the government -- 4.3.1 Corporate thoughts -- 4.3.2 Dimensions of group agency -- 4.4 Personalities in the public sector -- 4.4.1 Populating the public sector -- 4.4.2 Boundary entities -- 4.5 Taking role play seriously -- 5 Virtual realities -- 5.1 The law world -- 5.2 The importance of the nonactual -- 5.2.1 How to talk about the nonactual -- 5.2.2 Why talk about the nonactual? -- 5.3 Virtual realities in the law -- 5.3.1 The dangers of speculation and the "categorical approach" -- 5.3.2 When speculation is required -- 5.3.2.1 Means-end review -- 5.3.2.2 Reversible-error review -- 5.3.3 Hypotheticals as how-tos -- 5.3.3.1 Language, usage, meaning -- 5.3.3.2 How to apply rules -- 5.3.3.3 What will be -- 5.4 Possible legal worlds -- 5.4.1 Contemporary jurispathy -- 5.4.2 Keeping options open -- 5.5 Openness in a closed world -- 6 Reading the layers of law -- 6.1 Scripts that use texts as props -- 6.2 Building blocks -- 6.2.1 Action for reasons: instruction-props -- 6.2.2 The eternal present: anchor-props -- 6.2.2.1 Eternal precedent -- 6.2.2.2 The weight of time and access to origins -- 6.3 Embedding and stories of departure and return -- 6.3.1 The "disastrous misadventure" of twentieth-century legal development -- 6.3.2 Stories of mistaken departure in Obergefell -- 6.3.3 Lawyering in layers -- 6.4 Apotheosis of the wordsmith -- 6.4.1 The "inner grammarian" -- 6.4.2 Breaking it down -- 6.5 Off the page -- Appendix: Supreme Court 2014 Term opinions listed alphabetically -- Bibliography -- Index |
| Summary |
Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of drivers stopped by the police to the decision-making processes of the Environmental Protection Agency--as well as the term's best-known case, which recognized a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex as well as different-sex couples. Fiction and the Languages of Law reframes a number of long-running legal debates, identifies other related paradoxes within legal discourse, and traces them all to common sources: judges' and lawyers' habit of alternating unselfconsciously between two different attitudes toward the language they use, and a set of professional biases that tends to prevent scrutiny of that habit |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Dr Karen Petroski, St Louis University School of Law, USA, has been teaching law since 2008 and is trained in both literary analysis and law. She has published several articles and book chapters on legal fictions and the relationship between fictional and legal discourse, including chapters in Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (ed. Maksymilian Del Mar & William Twining, Springer, 2015) and The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn About Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy (ed. Brian Slocum, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) |
|
Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed November 6, 2018) |
| Subject |
United States. Supreme Court.
|
| SUBJECT |
United States. Supreme Court fast |
| Subject |
Law -- United States -- Language
|
|
Judicial opinions -- United States -- Language
|
|
LAW -- Essays.
|
|
LAW -- General Practice.
|
|
LAW -- Jurisprudence.
|
|
LAW -- Paralegals & Paralegalism.
|
|
LAW -- Practical Guides.
|
|
LAW -- Reference.
|
|
LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES -- Communication.
|
|
LAW -- Court Records.
|
|
LAW -- Legal Education.
|
|
Judicial opinions -- Language
|
|
Law -- Language
|
|
United States
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9781351163828 |
|
1351163825 |
|
9781351163811 |
|
1351163817 |
|
9781351163842 |
|
1351163841 |
|
9781351163835 |
|
1351163833 |
|
