How and Why: Deepening Your Legal Reasoning

How and WhyOne of my favorite law review articles to assign to first-year law students is Kristen K. Robbins-Tiscione’s Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric to Validate Legal Reasoning, 27 Vt. L. Rev. 483 (2002). The article walks a reader through the legal paradigm and discusses how to effectively use deductive reasoning and reasoning by analogy to create a valid and persuasive argument. One of the takeaways from this article is that an advocate should include the facts, holding, and reasoning of a case precedent being used to explain a legal rule. “Facts, holding, and reasoning” becomes somewhat of a mantra in my first-year legal writing courses.

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Congratulations to the 2014 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competitors

The Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition is an appellate moot court competition for Marquette law students and the capstone event of the intramural moot court program. Students are invited to participate based on their top performance in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy course at the Law School.

Congratulations to the participants in the 2014 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition:

Dane Brown
Michelle Cahoon
Tyler Coppage
James DeCleene
Sarah Erdmann
Joel Graczyk
Amy Heart
Brian Kane
Amanda Luedtke
Christopher McNamara
Jennifer McNamee
Elizabeth Oestreich
Nicole Ostrowski
Frank Remington
Amanda Toonen
Becky Van Dam
Kara Vosburgh
Derek Waterstreet

Students will begin writing their appellate briefs in January with the rounds of oral argument commencing later this spring. The competition includes preliminary oral argument rounds (March 22 and 23) and a semifinal (March 27) and final round (April 2).

The Jenkins competitors are fortunate to have the opportunity to argue before distinguished members of the bench and bar from Wisconsin and beyond.

The competition is named after the James G. Jenkins, the first Marquette Law School dean.

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Lincoln and JFK

JFK and LincolnPBS documentary Lincoln@Gettysburg paints a vivid picture of Lincoln and those close to him in the days surrounding his oration at Gettysburg. Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd begged him not to leave for Gettysburg because their young son Tad was seriously ill. He went anyway. Lincoln’s valet, William Johnson, an African-American free man, accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg and listened to Lincoln practice his speech that morning. Lincoln left Gettysburg with a fever and came down with smallpox. Johnson died weeks later from smallpox after caring for Lincoln. Lincoln chose the inscription “Citizen” on Johnson’s tombstone, and Johnson was buried at Arlington cemetery.

And, Lincoln knew that his speech, just ten sentences long, would be transmitted by telegraph and printed in newspapers across the nation. Lincoln, in those ten sentences, was reaching out to the people at the Gettysburg ceremony, but he was also reaching out to the nation. It was unusual for presidents to give this type of speech in those days, but Lincoln accepted the invitation to speak at Gettysburg. Lincoln, it could be said, was a (social) media genius.

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