The rhetorical boundaries of ‘the law’: A consideration of the rhetorical culture of legal practice and the case of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine

Abstract

In the lexicon of contemporary liberal‐democratic legal practice, to “think like a lawyer” is to have mastered the fundamental, rational principles of “the law, “ a mastery which confers a technical, professional understanding of legal practices unavailable to ordinary, untrained people. This essay invites critics to take a different approach to jurisprudence, one that looks at the ways in which laws are negotiated within the broader rhetorical culture and then transformed into legal edicts. Using a case study of the “Separate But Equal” doctrine, the authors offer a set of characteristics that demarcate the rhetorical substance of legal practices within American rhetorical culture.

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