Speaker 7 will introduce options for annotating a corpus, using as an example a publicly availabl... more Speaker 7 will introduce options for annotating a corpus, using as an example a publicly available corpus of texts written by legal writing students. Annotating a corpus allows the researcher to "bracket" portions of artifacts, like complex legal citations, to exclude them from analysis; or to code portions to allow comparison, for example, between different common sections of a genre, like the fact section of a legal brief and its argument. Because annotation is labor-intensive, it often requires the work of multiple humans, which raises concerns about inter-rater reliability. Attendees will engage in an activity where they code and compare their codes on samples of texts from the corpus. Throughout this talk, I've used examples from my own work, not because they are particularly good, but because I know them well. And my work could not normally be called corpus linguistics. For example, I used these principles in two studies: one using student-written legal texts, an example of which we will look at today. Published in Written Communication, it's perhaps more of a natural-language processing or NLP study. The other, with Lee-Ann Breuch at University of Minnesota, is an essay in the new methods-focused volume Points of Departure. It's a genre study of student use of research sources in technical writing where we didn't use any computational tools for coding or assessment. The examples I used today will be from the Written Communication study. _______________________ Larson, B. N.
For Bennardo and Chew, "sticky" citations are those that arose from within the case's proceedings... more For Bennardo and Chew, "sticky" citations are those that arose from within the case's proceedings and the parties' briefs. Id. Note that the earlier studies cited later in this Article did not use any of this nomenclature. See infra Section II.A. This is as good a point as any to explain my typographical conventions: using double quotation marks only for material quoted from other authorities, single quotation marks for references to the name of a concept or any word or phrase not quoted from other authorities, and Italics to indicate emphasis.
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interac... more Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.
We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative per... more We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be subject to rational critique, and the scheme avoids the is/ought fallacy. We ground our theoretical discussion and observations in an empirical study of US district court opinions resolving legal questions about copyright fair use and the lawyers’ briefs that led...
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interac... more Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred norma...
We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators ... more We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, antisocial personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. We also found that this group attempted to resist othering by rhetorical strategies such as providing evidence of change in character, distinction within the othered group, and proof of internal controls over unacceptable impulses. Finally, we discovered that such othering relies heavily on medical expertise, even though some medical practitioners may disagree with, or be hesitant in, their roles in this medico-legal collaboration.
Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photog... more Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photographers take? Who owns the copyrights in the text and other content in real estate listings? What can listing brokers and multiple listing services do to enhance and protect listing brokers\u27 rights in their listing-content portfolios? This book provides a comprehensive overview of legal issues relating to copyrights in real estate listings. Brian Larson and Mitchell Skinner, leading attorneys for real estate brokerages, multiple listing services, and REALTOR(r) associations nationwide, begin with the basics of copyright law applied to the real estate context and then step through all the key issues, including portfolio strategies, registration, and enforcement. This book is a unique and essential resource for anyone working with real estate listing content
In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language... more In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory (RT), an approach to experimental pragmatics grounded in cognitive science, offers the bridge. I begin by reviewing Gricean pragmatics and its incompatibility with rhetoric and cognitive science. I then sketch RT, but importantly, I identify revisions to RT that make it a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, a cognitive pragmatic rhetorical (CPR) theory. CPR theory strengthens RT by clarifying what it means to be relevant-and irrelevant-in relevance-theoretic terms. Meanwhile, it provides rhetoric a set of principles for its functioning grounded in cognitive science. I conclude with sample CPRtheoretic analyses. 1 Introduction1 Rhetoric and pragmatics were born together in the Athens of the fifth century BCE. In their history of early pragmatics, Nerlich and Clarke (1996) found its roots in Protagoras' identification of the moods or modes of speech ("statement, question and imperative") and in Aristotle's Rhetoric (2007). Protagoras was one of the sophists, philosophers credited with innovation in the teaching of rhetoric in Athens at the time. Contemporary pragmatics focuses on ascribing meaning to utterances, using context to enrich literal or decoded meaning. Rhetoricians are deeply interested in the work that words do, particularly the work of persuasion, regardless of what their literal meaning might be. Pragmatics "has to do with all context-dependent aspects of meaning 'systematically abstracted away from in the pure semantics of logical form'" (Nerlich/ Clarke 1996, quoting Horn 1992). To the extent that pragmatic theories extend 1 I would like to thank Dr. Alan Gross and Christopher Cocchiarella for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, 2017
Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should atten... more Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners. The principles outlined here should guide practitioners, researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.
Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deducti... more Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deductive syllogism, and called "no kind of reasoning at all" by Judge Posner. Arguments by legal analogy happen every day in courtrooms, law offices, and law school classrooms, and they are the essence of what we mean when we talk of thinking like a lawyer. But we have no productive and normative theory for creating and evaluating them. Entries in the debate over the last twenty-five years by Professors Sunstein, Schauer, Brewer, Weinreb, and others leave us at an impasse: the "skeptics" are too focused on the rational force offered by the deductive syllogism when they should attend to the kinds of arguments that can provide premises for deduction-exactly the work that legal analogy accomplishes. Meanwhile, the "mystics" expect us to accept legal analogy without an account of how to discipline it. Using the argumentation schemes and critical questions of informal logic, this article constructs a theory grounded in philosophy, but kitted out for action. The theory is not skeptic or mystic, but dynamic.
Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of usi... more Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of using live streaming technology, citing that although live streaming has a broadcasting capability, it is not regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, unlike other broadcasting media such as radio or television. Without this regulation, live streaming is opened up for broad use and misuse, including broadcasts of horrifying incidents such as the mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, sparking outrage and fear about the technology. Contributors provide a pathway to move forward with ethical and legal use of live streaming by analyzing the wide spectrum of critical issues through the lens of communication, ethics, and law. Scholars of legal studies, ethics, communication, and media studies will find this book particularly useful
This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the... more This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. We added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.
This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argum... more This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and a concluding phase. Those phases are the umbrella under which discrete argumentation phases occur at points we call stases. Whenever litigants seek a ruling or judgment, they reach a stasis—a stopping or standing point for arguing procedural points of disagreement. During these stases, the parties make arguments that fall...
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technica... more University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisor: Mary Schuster. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 334 pages + 1 zip file of supplementary materials
Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods, 2017
Pa r t 3 : e x P l o r i n g i n f o r m at i o n c o n t e x t s InTeRchApTeR 3: What Does Thres... more Pa r t 3 : e x P l o r i n g i n f o r m at i o n c o n t e x t s InTeRchApTeR 3: What Does Threshold-concept Research offer Writing Studies RAD Research?
The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound imp... more The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound impacts on our lives. Understanding those practices in light of theories of reasoning and argumentation is thus critical for understanding law and the society it shapes. An inquiry that explores the very foundations of all legal reasoning leads to a broad, important question: How do lawyers and judges use cited cases in their legal arguments? It turns out there is practically no empirical research to suggest the answer. As the first step in a comprehensive empirical effort to answer this question, this article performs a ground-breaking analysis of a carefully constructed corpus of judicial opinions and the advocates’ briefs that gave rise to them. It tells us not just that these textual artifacts cited court opinions, but how they used the opinions in their reasoning. The article then reveals whether judges and advocates placed different values on different ways of using cited cases. These practitioners used them to make assertions about legal rules in their arguments about twice as often as they used them as legal analogies and about four times as often as they used them to make policy arguments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the practices of judges differed significantly from those of advocates. But so, too, did those of the prevailing advocates and their less fortunate opponents. On functional grounds, therefore, this article empirically supports the claim that there is a hierarchy of rational legal argumentative appeals, and that there is a common look to the ‘losing brief.’ This special convergence between theory and function can transform ongoing debates across legal scholarship on the value of drawing on precedent as a tool for rational persuasion.
Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication - SIGDOC '16, 2016
This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the su... more This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from recurring social actions ( ). We discovered evidence of genre hybridity in the signals of instructional genres embedded into customer reviews. Our paper discusses the creation of a prototype web application, "Use What You Choose" (UWYC), which sorts the natural language text of Amazon reviews into two categories: instructionally-weighed reviews (e.g., reviews that contain operational information about products) and noninstructionally-weighed reviews (those that evaluate the quality of the product). Our results contribute to rhetorical genre theory and offer ideas on applying genre theory to inform application design for users of information services.
Speaker 7 will introduce options for annotating a corpus, using as an example a publicly availabl... more Speaker 7 will introduce options for annotating a corpus, using as an example a publicly available corpus of texts written by legal writing students. Annotating a corpus allows the researcher to "bracket" portions of artifacts, like complex legal citations, to exclude them from analysis; or to code portions to allow comparison, for example, between different common sections of a genre, like the fact section of a legal brief and its argument. Because annotation is labor-intensive, it often requires the work of multiple humans, which raises concerns about inter-rater reliability. Attendees will engage in an activity where they code and compare their codes on samples of texts from the corpus. Throughout this talk, I've used examples from my own work, not because they are particularly good, but because I know them well. And my work could not normally be called corpus linguistics. For example, I used these principles in two studies: one using student-written legal texts, an example of which we will look at today. Published in Written Communication, it's perhaps more of a natural-language processing or NLP study. The other, with Lee-Ann Breuch at University of Minnesota, is an essay in the new methods-focused volume Points of Departure. It's a genre study of student use of research sources in technical writing where we didn't use any computational tools for coding or assessment. The examples I used today will be from the Written Communication study. _______________________ Larson, B. N.
For Bennardo and Chew, "sticky" citations are those that arose from within the case's proceedings... more For Bennardo and Chew, "sticky" citations are those that arose from within the case's proceedings and the parties' briefs. Id. Note that the earlier studies cited later in this Article did not use any of this nomenclature. See infra Section II.A. This is as good a point as any to explain my typographical conventions: using double quotation marks only for material quoted from other authorities, single quotation marks for references to the name of a concept or any word or phrase not quoted from other authorities, and Italics to indicate emphasis.
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interac... more Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.
We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative per... more We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be subject to rational critique, and the scheme avoids the is/ought fallacy. We ground our theoretical discussion and observations in an empirical study of US district court opinions resolving legal questions about copyright fair use and the lawyers’ briefs that led...
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interac... more Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred norma...
We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators ... more We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, antisocial personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. We also found that this group attempted to resist othering by rhetorical strategies such as providing evidence of change in character, distinction within the othered group, and proof of internal controls over unacceptable impulses. Finally, we discovered that such othering relies heavily on medical expertise, even though some medical practitioners may disagree with, or be hesitant in, their roles in this medico-legal collaboration.
Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photog... more Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photographers take? Who owns the copyrights in the text and other content in real estate listings? What can listing brokers and multiple listing services do to enhance and protect listing brokers\u27 rights in their listing-content portfolios? This book provides a comprehensive overview of legal issues relating to copyrights in real estate listings. Brian Larson and Mitchell Skinner, leading attorneys for real estate brokerages, multiple listing services, and REALTOR(r) associations nationwide, begin with the basics of copyright law applied to the real estate context and then step through all the key issues, including portfolio strategies, registration, and enforcement. This book is a unique and essential resource for anyone working with real estate listing content
In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language... more In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory (RT), an approach to experimental pragmatics grounded in cognitive science, offers the bridge. I begin by reviewing Gricean pragmatics and its incompatibility with rhetoric and cognitive science. I then sketch RT, but importantly, I identify revisions to RT that make it a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, a cognitive pragmatic rhetorical (CPR) theory. CPR theory strengthens RT by clarifying what it means to be relevant-and irrelevant-in relevance-theoretic terms. Meanwhile, it provides rhetoric a set of principles for its functioning grounded in cognitive science. I conclude with sample CPRtheoretic analyses. 1 Introduction1 Rhetoric and pragmatics were born together in the Athens of the fifth century BCE. In their history of early pragmatics, Nerlich and Clarke (1996) found its roots in Protagoras' identification of the moods or modes of speech ("statement, question and imperative") and in Aristotle's Rhetoric (2007). Protagoras was one of the sophists, philosophers credited with innovation in the teaching of rhetoric in Athens at the time. Contemporary pragmatics focuses on ascribing meaning to utterances, using context to enrich literal or decoded meaning. Rhetoricians are deeply interested in the work that words do, particularly the work of persuasion, regardless of what their literal meaning might be. Pragmatics "has to do with all context-dependent aspects of meaning 'systematically abstracted away from in the pure semantics of logical form'" (Nerlich/ Clarke 1996, quoting Horn 1992). To the extent that pragmatic theories extend 1 I would like to thank Dr. Alan Gross and Christopher Cocchiarella for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
Proceedings of the First ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, 2017
Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should atten... more Researchers and practitioners in naturallanguage processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners. The principles outlined here should guide practitioners, researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.
Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deducti... more Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deductive syllogism, and called "no kind of reasoning at all" by Judge Posner. Arguments by legal analogy happen every day in courtrooms, law offices, and law school classrooms, and they are the essence of what we mean when we talk of thinking like a lawyer. But we have no productive and normative theory for creating and evaluating them. Entries in the debate over the last twenty-five years by Professors Sunstein, Schauer, Brewer, Weinreb, and others leave us at an impasse: the "skeptics" are too focused on the rational force offered by the deductive syllogism when they should attend to the kinds of arguments that can provide premises for deduction-exactly the work that legal analogy accomplishes. Meanwhile, the "mystics" expect us to accept legal analogy without an account of how to discipline it. Using the argumentation schemes and critical questions of informal logic, this article constructs a theory grounded in philosophy, but kitted out for action. The theory is not skeptic or mystic, but dynamic.
Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of usi... more Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of using live streaming technology, citing that although live streaming has a broadcasting capability, it is not regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, unlike other broadcasting media such as radio or television. Without this regulation, live streaming is opened up for broad use and misuse, including broadcasts of horrifying incidents such as the mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, sparking outrage and fear about the technology. Contributors provide a pathway to move forward with ethical and legal use of live streaming by analyzing the wide spectrum of critical issues through the lens of communication, ethics, and law. Scholars of legal studies, ethics, communication, and media studies will find this book particularly useful
This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the... more This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. We added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.
This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argum... more This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and a concluding phase. Those phases are the umbrella under which discrete argumentation phases occur at points we call stases. Whenever litigants seek a ruling or judgment, they reach a stasis—a stopping or standing point for arguing procedural points of disagreement. During these stases, the parties make arguments that fall...
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technica... more University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisor: Mary Schuster. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 334 pages + 1 zip file of supplementary materials
Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods, 2017
Pa r t 3 : e x P l o r i n g i n f o r m at i o n c o n t e x t s InTeRchApTeR 3: What Does Thres... more Pa r t 3 : e x P l o r i n g i n f o r m at i o n c o n t e x t s InTeRchApTeR 3: What Does Threshold-concept Research offer Writing Studies RAD Research?
The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound imp... more The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound impacts on our lives. Understanding those practices in light of theories of reasoning and argumentation is thus critical for understanding law and the society it shapes. An inquiry that explores the very foundations of all legal reasoning leads to a broad, important question: How do lawyers and judges use cited cases in their legal arguments? It turns out there is practically no empirical research to suggest the answer. As the first step in a comprehensive empirical effort to answer this question, this article performs a ground-breaking analysis of a carefully constructed corpus of judicial opinions and the advocates’ briefs that gave rise to them. It tells us not just that these textual artifacts cited court opinions, but how they used the opinions in their reasoning. The article then reveals whether judges and advocates placed different values on different ways of using cited cases. These practitioners used them to make assertions about legal rules in their arguments about twice as often as they used them as legal analogies and about four times as often as they used them to make policy arguments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the practices of judges differed significantly from those of advocates. But so, too, did those of the prevailing advocates and their less fortunate opponents. On functional grounds, therefore, this article empirically supports the claim that there is a hierarchy of rational legal argumentative appeals, and that there is a common look to the ‘losing brief.’ This special convergence between theory and function can transform ongoing debates across legal scholarship on the value of drawing on precedent as a tool for rational persuasion.
Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication - SIGDOC '16, 2016
This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the su... more This paper reports on the results of an intensive application development workshop held in the summer of 2015 during which a group of thirteen researchers came together to explore the use of machine-learning algorithms in technical communication. To do this we analyzed Amazon.com consumer electronic product customer reviews to reevaluate a central concept in North American Genre Theory: stable genre structures arise from recurring social actions ( ). We discovered evidence of genre hybridity in the signals of instructional genres embedded into customer reviews. Our paper discusses the creation of a prototype web application, "Use What You Choose" (UWYC), which sorts the natural language text of Amazon reviews into two categories: instructionally-weighed reviews (e.g., reviews that contain operational information about products) and noninstructionally-weighed reviews (those that evaluate the quality of the product). Our results contribute to rhetorical genre theory and offer ideas on applying genre theory to inform application design for users of information services.
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interac... more Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.
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