New Rhetorics for Contemporary Legal Discourse

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? Bringing together an international range of legal scholars, this collection takes a diachronic approach and addresses these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse. It explores the changes in legal form and transmission that have been generated both by globalisation and by common law’s irreversible encounter with the civilian methods of European law. It explores how, in the contemporary legal discourse, exemplarity – and all rhetoric processes based on the general-particular dichotomy more generally – regained relevance. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of the example and proposes the development of new rhetorical approaches better suited to today’s legal practices which operate in a globalised field.

Angela Condello is Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy in the Law Department, University of Messina; she is also Adjunct Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, where she holds a Jean Monnet Module on human rights and critical legal thinking within the European legal culture. She has written two monographs and edited journal issues (Law and Literature, Law Text Culture), and various volumes, among which Sensing the Nation's Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (Springer, 2018), Post-Truth, Philosophy and Law (Routledge, 2019), Law, Labour and the Humanities. Contemporary European Perspectives (Routledge, 2019).