By Justin R. Kishbaugh*
The authors of Gut Renovations: Using Critical and Comparative Rhetoric to Remodel How the Law Addresses Privilege and Power argue that both the form and substance of traditional legal analysis work to reinforce systems of racial, gender, and class inequity. As such, they contend that if legal writing professors continue to teach deduction and IRAC as the only “correct” method for legal analysis, they are essentially perpetuating a homogenizing and exclusionary methodology. The authors argue that this methodology authorizes and represents only the voice and logic of elite privilege. In this Article, I present evidence that like deduction and IRAC, the very medium of legal writing itself—Standard Edited American English (SEAE)—is a system that replicates and perpetuates implicit racial, gender, and class biases. Despite that both the legal academy and profession operate almost exclusively in SEAE, the privilege that it and its users are afforded allows it to function as an unnamed but constant standard against which difference is marked as deficiency. Therefore, SEAE exists as a paradox: it acts as the mark of quality for academic and legal writing but is rarely acknowledged except when not present and is even more rarely taught in any deliberate or recursive manner. I contend that professors should design and employ rubrics that make explicit the structure of SEAE and their expectations for it in their students’ writing. Students will then be able to identify and meet those standards for a “well-written” text, and professors will prevent the implicit biases inherent in SEAE and writing assessment from affecting their grading process.