| Credit Hours: | 2 |
| Description: | Advocacy is at the heart of your function as an attorney. Whether your practice is transactional or in court, the attorney stands “at the turn” of another to advocate, “speak toward,” the client’s position. Effective advocacy requires the foundation of logic, authority, and factual interpretation we learn in Basic Legal Skills. These are necessary but not sufficient tools for effective representation. Even with a solid foundation, the advocate must make the case come alive for the jury, the judge, or even the public to move the decision maker to act for the client. The lawyer’s tool for lifting the client’s case above the workaday and into the decision maker’s conscience is language. Rhetoric is the art of language which brings the technique of law into full effect. Rhetoric examines the use and strategies of language to make knowledge or belief persuasive. In Rhetoric of Persuasive Advocacy, we will study and practice written advocacy in the spirit of our namesake, Salmon P. Chase, the foremost civil rights attorney of his day. We will take as our examples of persuasive advocacy the champions of Civil Rights across the history of our republic: Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Thaddeus Stevens, and Ida B. Wells. We shall study the advocacy of Thurgood Marshall at the bar on the 60th anniversary of the argument of Brown v. Board of Education. We shall study the power of rhetoric to move nations on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and the I Have a Dream address at the Lincoln Memorial. We shall study the persuasion of Lincoln himself on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Even truths self-evident require advocacy to come to fruition. In these examples, we will discover and use patterns of persuasion that you will use to urge justice. We will have progressively weighted exercises plus a take-home final in which you will argue civil rights issues where the truth is decidedly NOT self-evident. I will post a reading list during the summer so that you may prepare in advance. I look forward to sharing with you our rich heritage of advocacy. |
| Prerequisite: | Basic Legal Skills I and II |
| AWR Possible: | AWR Research and AWR Drafting |
| Enrollment Cap: | 20 |
Salmon P. Chase College of Law
Office of Admissions
1 Nunn Drive, 216 Nunn Hall
Highland Heights, KY 41099
859-572-5490
