Ethics and Legal Rhetoric

Taking the novel position of dealing with law, classical rhetoric and feminism concurrently, this book considers the effects of beliefs about language on those who attempt to theorize about and use law to accomplish practical and political purposes. The author employs Aristotle's terminology to analyze economic and literary schools of thought in the US legal academy, noting the implicit language theory underlying claims by major thinkers in each school about the nature of law and its relationship to justice. The underlying assumption is that, as law can only work through language, beliefs about its relationship to justice are determined by assumptions about the nature of language. In addition, the author provides an alternative, feminist rhetoric that, being focused on the production of texts rather than their interpretation, offers a practical ethic of intervention.

Dr Frances J. Ranney is Associate Professor and Director of Women's Studies in the Department of English at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wayne State University, USA.