Yovel on What Lawyers Can Learn From Renaissance Drama

Jonathan Yovel, University of Haifa Faculty of Law, NYU School of Law, Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice; Yale Law School, has published What Can Lawyers Learn from Renaissance Drama?. Here is the abstract.

What can lawyers, who are typically engaged in challenges of persuasion across the entire spectrum of practice, learn from the shift to normative language in drama? This study looks at the creative and restrictive roles of legal and normative language in two central dramas of the renaissance: "Bradamante" (1582) by Robert Garnier (who was also a high ranking judge), and John Milton’s passionately personal work, "Samson Agonistes" (1671). It compares the intensive reliance on legal metaphors and structures in the latter with the almost total lack of those in the former. Applying a linguistic lens, the article explores the role of legal language in the construction of argument and dispute in the renaissance's and early modernity's shift to normativity as the basis of relations: political, familial, romantic and obligatory. Wide ranging and intense, these dramas supply a laboratory for the construction of persuasive argument in thematic contexts of war, generational strife, romance, betrayal, and sovereignty. Normative -- and specifically legal -- language offers parties shared yet competing grammars and vocabularies for forming and organizing disputes. Dialogical and non-dominating, it offers an alternative to mere linguistic quarrel. The reach of legal language extends beyond the law, and its sources and uses extend far beyond legal textuality. Legal and normative languages are both restrictive and generative: like grammar, they present valid modes of expression while inviting speakers to challenge, explore, expand and create new ones. Normative language is relevant to argument since it responds to the latter's need to bridge different ideologies and supply effective persuasion. In the dramas explored here, legal and normative languages both succeed and fail to anchor communication in shifting discourse ethics, while speakers use and manipulate it to talk to friends, lovers, antagonists, political sovereignty and god -- as well as to themselves, forming a distinctive modern sense of subjectivity where the reflexive self must answer to itself. The article concludes with a systemazation of these findings in terms of the discourse ethics of persuasion, concerning consensus and persuadability, building on partly overlapping insights by Wittgenstein, Habermas, Perelman and Derrida.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.