New Rhetorics for Contemporary Legal Discourse

Book excerpt: Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? Bringing together an international range of legal scholars, this collection takes a diachronic approach and addresses these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse. It explores the changes in legal form and transmission that have been generated both by globalisation and by common law's irreversible encounter with the civilian methods of European law. It explores how, in the contemporary legal discourse, exemplarity - and all rhetoric processes based on the general-particular dichotomy more generally - regained relevance. In doing so, it highlights the centrality of the example and proposes the development of new rhetorical approaches better suited to today's legal practices which operate in a globalised field.