Law, Philosophy, and the Rhetorical Tradition

Francis Joseph Mootz III, UNLV School of Law, has published "The Irrelevance of Contemporary Academic Philosophy for Law: Recovering the Rhetorical Tradition," in On Philosophy in American Law (F. J. Mootz III, ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

This short paper will appear in a volume of original essays, On Philosophy in American Law (Francis J. Mootz III ed., Cambridge Univ. Press forthcoming 2009). I argue that the undeniable rift between philosophy and law is more than a simple dichotomy of theory and practice. Instead, the sharp distinction between philosophy and law occurred when both disciplines built insular guilds that employed distinctive vocabularies to distinguish themselves from rhetoric, and it is by returning to their roots in rhetoric that philosophy and law might find their common ground in the elucidation of rhetorical knowledge.

Download the paper from SSRN here.