New Rhetorics for Contemporary Legal Discourse

Presents a new way of thinking about the relationship between law and language.

• Invites the reader to rethink the value of legal rhetorics, understood as a broad field including argumentation, epistemology, and legal practice and experience
• Introduces casuistry as a new perspective valuable also for civil law systems
• Illustrates how single cases interpellate general norms and thus invites a reflection on legal normativity

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.

The book 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.