Teaching the Basic Ethics Class Through Simulation: The Northwestern Program in Advocacy and Professionalism

The Northwestern University School of Law created and published a set of materials for teaching the basic ethics course principally through the simulation method. Burns provides a very compressed summary of the underlying program, describes the classes themselves and the mix of teaching methods professors employ, and briefly discusses the program materials

The Jury as a Political Institution: An Internal Perspective

In this Essay, I will briefly describe some of the more obvious ways in which the jury has been considered a political institution. I will then discuss the senses in which we can understand the term “political” in the context of the American jury trial. I will describe the senses in which Hannah Arendt, perhaps the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, tried to distinguish between “the political” and the “the legal” and the limitations of any such distinction. I will then turn to the heart of this Essay, a description of the ways in which the American trial, as we actually have it, is a political institution. I argue that attention to our actual linguistic practices at trial reveals the jury trial to be a hybrid institution, with aspects of traditional legal formalism, but one in which the jury is finally asked to make what we may fairly call a political judgment about what is most important in the case. Finally, I will describe two recent important attempts to revive the political dimension of the work of the jury in the context of criminal law

The Distinctiveness of Trial Narrative

Scholars have drawn on the rich literature on narrative in their research into the American trial, a perspective at least implicitly endorsed by the United States Supreme Court in the Old Chief case. This is all to the good. However, the real power of the narrative approach emerges when one thinks concretely about what is distinctive to the different kinds of narrative employed at trial. This article explores the rhetorical and epistemological significance of trial narrative in the full context of the consciously structured hybrid of language practices that make up the American trial. Such a perspective enables us to admire a well-tried case as realizing practical truths beyond story-telling

The Jury as a Political Institution: An Internal Perspective

In this Essay, I will briefly describe some of the more obvious ways in which the jury has been considered a political institution. I will then discuss the senses in which we can understand the term “political” in the context of the American jury trial. I will describe the senses in which Hannah Arendt, perhaps the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, tried to distinguish between “the political” and the “the legal” and the limitations of any such distinction. I will then turn to the heart of this Essay, a description of the ways in which the American trial, as we actually have it, is a political institution. I argue that attention to our actual linguistic practices at trial reveals the jury trial to be a hybrid institution, with aspects of traditional legal formalism, but one in which the jury is finally asked to make what we may fairly call a political judgment about what is most important in the case. Finally, I will describe two recent important attempts to revive the political dimension of the work of the jury in the context of criminal law

Styles of Pragmatism, Social Science and the Law

I have long held as an ideal the words of one of foremost American interpreters of John Dewey\u27s philosophy: An adequate, comprehensive political and social theory must be at once empirical, interpretive, and critical. How these styles of social inquiry, whose practitioners often seem at war, might cohere has never been completely clear. This essay is an attempt to work out in a very limited context some of the issues surrounding these relationships. In particular, I want to explore the relationship between the interpretive style, which I take to be central, and the other two. The focus of these remarks is my recent attempt to give a reasonably adequate account of an important institution, the American trial. Is it possible to give the best interpretation of a social institution without an Archimedian point? I think the example of the trial and the continuity in the forms of interpretation between trials and accounts of trials suggests that there is

Advocacy in the Era of the Vanishing Trial

This is the published version