Karen Petroski
Saint Louis University, School of Law, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In Writing in Public, Trevor Ross repeatedly characterizes key phenomena—eighteenth-century concepts of the public, literature, and the legal treatment of these and related issues—as elusive. He does so using a small set of associated... more
In Writing in Public, Trevor Ross repeatedly characterizes key phenomena—eighteenth-century concepts of the public, literature, and the legal treatment of these and related issues—as elusive. He does so using a small set of associated adjectives: “incoherent,” “indeterminate,” and “ambiguous,” among others. This essay explores how Ross’s practice in this regard might be linked to his historical focus, first by cataloging Ross’s approaches to elusiveness and unfolding some of the implications of his attributions. On some topics, such as the orientation of members of the eighteenth-century public toward other members of that public, Ross’s accounts of indeterminacy are especially sensitive and persuasive. But his accounts of experiencing various kinds of elusiveness remain relatively fragmentary. Curiously, Ross attributes little significance to eighteenth-century readers’ exposure to and processing of explicitly fictional narrative. Consideration of the dynamics of fictional discours...
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James Obergefell . . . asks [in this case] whether Ohio can erase his marriage to John Arthur for all time. April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse . . . ask whether Michigan may continue to deny them the certainty and stability all mothers desire... more
James Obergefell . . . asks [in this case] whether Ohio can erase his marriage to John Arthur for all time. April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse . . . ask whether Michigan may continue to deny them the certainty and stability all mothers desire to protect their children. . . . Ijpe DeKoe and Thomas Kostura . . . ask whether Tennessee can deny to one who has served this Nation the basic dignity of recognizing his New York marriage.1
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Recently, the Green Bag issued a call for short (1,000 words) essays on Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. We sought “[a]ny theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help... more
Recently, the Green Bag issued a call for short (1,000 words) essays on Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. We sought “[a]ny theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help readers better understand the book.” The result is this micro-symposium. Our call drew dozens of micro-essays, some thought-provoking, some chuckle-prompting, and some both. Blessed with an abundance of good work but cursed by a shortage of space, we were compelled to select a small set – representative and excellent – of those essays to publish in the Green Bag and its sibling publication, the Journal of Law. We regret that we cannot do full justice to the outpouring of first-rate commentary we received. May you enjoy reading the following excellent representatives as much as we did
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Recently, the Green Bag issued a call for short (1,000 words) essays on Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. We sought “[a]ny theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help... more
Recently, the Green Bag issued a call for short (1,000 words) essays on Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. We sought “[a]ny theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help readers better understand the book.” The result is this micro-symposium. Our call drew dozens of micro-essays, some thought-provoking, some chuckle-prompting, and some both. Blessed with an abundance of good work but cursed by a shortage of space, we were compelled to select a small set – representative and excellent – of those essays to publish in the Green Bag and its sibling publication, the Journal of Law. We regret that we cannot do full justice to the outpouring of first-rate commentary we received. May you enjoy reading the following excellent representatives as much as we did.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Law, Political Science, Jurisdiction, Supreme Court, Genre Theory, and 12 moreLegal interpretation, Civil Procedure, Procedural Law, Social Science Research Network, Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, Doctrine, Statutory law, Statute, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Substantive Law, and Erie Doctrine
Since Lon Fuller published his 1930 trilogy of essays on the topic, students of the legal fiction have focused on identifying additional examples of fictions or challenging Fuller's classic taxonomy. But Fuller did more in these... more
Since Lon Fuller published his 1930 trilogy of essays on the topic, students of the legal fiction have focused on identifying additional examples of fictions or challenging Fuller's classic taxonomy. But Fuller did more in these essays than propose a definition and a classification system; he also argued that legal fictions are examples of a more general phenomenon found in many systems of specialised language usage. Drawing on work done in the intervening decades on related issues outside the law, this paper develops this insight in new directions, seeking to understand in more detail one of Fuller's principal concerns: the points at which legal language stops communicating, points that may shift over time but will never completely disappear. The analysis indicates that the currently prevailing understanding of legal fictions as, in essence, consciously counterfactual propositions is historically contingent and incomplete; that legal writers have generally used the ‘legal f...
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Much contemporary legal commentary contains nontextual information—everything from graphs and cartoons to geometric diagrams of the relations among legal concepts. No comprehensive account of this practice exists, so that most of those... more
Much contemporary legal commentary contains nontextual information—everything from graphs and cartoons to geometric diagrams of the relations among legal concepts. No comprehensive account of this practice exists, so that most of those participating in it today are unaware of the rich tradition from which it derives. This chapter explores that tradition, explaining the relations between visual legal commentary and a broader tradition of visual commentary, as well as the important relations between visual legal commentary and the historical consolidation of legal expertise.
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ABSTRACT