Elizabeth Berenguer, Lucy A. Jewel and Teri A. McMurtry-Chubbs’ Gut Renovations made an extraordinary contribution to the conversation by showing how traditional legal rhetoric, especially syllogistic reasoning, perpetuates bias and injustice, and proposed looking to non-Western rhetorical forms as an alternative. Essential to the argument is the idea that legal rules and the legal syllogism have great power to determine the outcomes of cases.
We agree that law is biased and that IRAC and rule-based reasoning often furthers that bias. But we argue that doesn’t have to be the case. IRAC and legal rules can be far less constraining and outcome determinative than they first appear. And if IRAC and rules are malleable—not fixed—they can be repurposed as instruments of change.
Sometimes a structural foundation is so faulty that the house must be torn down to the studs. But other times a house can be transformed through no-demo renos by using the structure that exists to create something new and beautiful. This Essay argues that in addition to Gut Renovations’ call to look to other forms of rhetoric to de-bias our perspectives and our law, we also must envision ways to achieve change through the structures of traditional rhetoric. We need to reform traditional legal rhetoric not just from the outside in, but also from the inside out.