Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
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“As a public citizen, a lawyer should seek improvement of . . . access to the legal system. . . . A lawyer should be mindful . . . that the poor, and sometimes persons who are not poor, cannot afford adequate legal assistance. . . . A lawyer . . . should help the bar regulate itself in the public interest.”
Lawyers who lie or steal can face disciplinary consequences for those misdeeds, as they should. They have duties to their clients, to the courts, and to the public; those duties are inconsistent with misrepresenting fact or law, and they are inconsistent with misusing the money or property that others have entrusted to their care.
But what about lawyers who “present[] another person’s ideas, information, expressions, or entire work as [their] own,” thereby engaging in plagiarism? Plagiarizing lawyers have been disciplined based on the notion that they lied, misrepresenting someone else’s ideas or language as their own; they can also be declared copyright infringers for misusing another lawyer’s intellectual property by copying that person’s legal writing without permission.
I began writing this Essay at the foot of the Ko‘olau Mountain Range on the windward side of the island of O‘ahu while on my summer break from teaching. That setting inspired, shaped, and guided the arguments in this Article.
Hawai‘i was once an independent and sovereign nation. The native inhabitants of the archipelago enjoyed an abundance of natural resources, which they consumed on a communal and subsistence basis, leaving ample time for the pursuit of social and cultural activities such as surfing and hula. After Hawaiians first interacted with Europeans in 1778, however, the native population began to fight disease, high infant mortality rates, and housing and healthcare inadequacies. Military personnel, missionaries, capitalists, and laborers recruited to work on sugar plantations migrated to the islands en masse, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the native population had been overwhelmed and substantially diminished. Then, in 1893, the U.S. military participated in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The indigenous population continues to experience the ongoing harms of colonialization—today Native Hawaiians in Hawai‘i occupy the bottom rungs of the islands’ socioeconomic ladder.
Professor Kevin Bennardo’s article entitled, Legal Writing’s Harmful Psyche, challenges the core values of the legal writing community. While his fundamental argument is that the legal writing community should focus less on legal writing equity issues and more on scholarly debate, he neither supports this argument nor examines the interrelationship between the two. Moreover, following Professor Bennardo’s advice would likely undermine many of the strides legal writing professors have made over the last two decades; indeed, legal writing professors would once again become isolated, alienated, and silenced, possibly destroying the discipline.
By way of background, the legal writing community is comprised of professors who teach legal writing, the vast majority of whom are women. As Bennardo concedes, “legal writing faculty are generally afforded lesser status in legal academia.” When the ABA required that law schools offer “at least one rigorous writing experience” to secure accreditation, they began to adopt formalized legal writing programs4 but did not offer teaching and scholarship support for legal writing faculty. In response, those in the legal writing academy formed the Legal Writing Institute (“LWI”) and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (“ALWD”) to provide such support and to advocate on behalf of their membership.
Elizabeth Berenguer, Lucy A. Jewel and Teri A. McMurtry-Chubbs’ Gut Renovations: Using Critical and Comparative Rhetoric to Remodel How the Law Addresses Privilege and Power interrogates one of the shibboleths of legal writing and analysis: deductive reasoning. Gut Renovations begins from the premise that deductive reasoning, if it is even mentioned at all in the scholarly arguments about the law’s bias, is largely discounted as being a minor player and a neutral organizational tool. This is, the authors argue, not only misguided but also counterproductive. Deductive reasoning, they posit, is not objective or neutral; rather, it is one of the central villains working to perpetuate bias in law. In other words, no matter how much we critique legal doctrine, law will continue to be an ineffectual tool in the fight for social justice as long as we teach deductive reasoning, uncritically, as the way to reason in law. This challenge to one of the most enduring orthodoxies of legal writing and rhetoric alone would make Gut Renovations worth reading and considering.
Founded in 1900, Stetson University College of Law began as a private law school focused on preparing students to become ethical and competent members of the legal profession. As such, Stetson provides a challenging educational experience coupled with an awareness and appreciation for social responsibility. This goal of excellence remains constant as Stetson celebrates its centennial year. In this issue, the Stetson Law Review revisits highlights of the last 100 years to commemorate such a notable event. The pieces are arranged roughly in chronological order by the dates of the subject matter to provide the reader with a clear picture of Stetson’s transition from Florida’s first law school to one of national distinction.
Stetson University College of Law celebrates its 100th year in 2000–2001. We enter this great celebratory year with justifiable pride in past accomplishments and great cause for optimism about the future. Never before has the Stetson law school community enjoyed so many advantages and so much favorable recognition. The College of Law is ranked among the top half of all law schools nationally, and the College of Law’s trial advocacy program has achieved unparalleled success.
Although I did not graduate from Stetson, the College of Law has been very special to me. As a young lawyer, I remember working with other members of the St. Petersburg Bar Association who tried to help Stetson relocate the College of Law to Gulfport. Dean Harold L. Sebring was a personal mentor to me, and I enjoyed being an adjunct professor at the College of Law in the early 1970s. I am from Pinellas County and used to live less than ten minutes from the campus.
I preface this Article about my father and his affiliation with Stetson University College of Law by disclosing that his career as a professor and dean began well before my birth and ended in 1939, when I was five years old. Family papers and memorabilia substantiate oral family traditions of Dean Tribble’s challenges, accomplishments, and disappointments while at Stetson. My conversations over the years with prominent lawyers and judges who studied law under my father provided further insight. These sources dictate that my account will be largely anecdotal and subjective, with more emphasis on Dean Tribble’s human and professional qualities than on the arcane politics of academia.
In preparing for its Centennial Celebration Symposium, the Stetson Law Review contacted Paul E. Raymond in Fall 1999 and asked him to submit an essay about his years as dean. Dean Raymond agreed to provide pertinent information and requested that the Stetson Law Review editors convert the information he provided into an essay.
Dean Raymond died on December 3, 1999, just a few weeks after the Review received his answers to the initial questions. To honor and remember him, the Review decided to publish the questions and answers with only minor modifications. We believe that the answers give a truer sense of Dean Raymond and his years of service than we could convey in an essay. We have added some footnotes to provide pertinent information and to put some of Dean Raymond’s comments into historical context.