- Texas A&M University School of Law
1515 Commerce Street, Room 119
Fort Worth, Texas 76102-6509
Brian N Larson
Texas A&M University, School of Law, Faculty Member
- Georgia Institute of Technology, Literature, Media, and Communication, Faculty MemberUniversity of Minnesota, Writing Studies, Graduate Studentadd
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Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should... more
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.
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We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our... more
We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be subject to rational critique, and the scheme avoids the is/ought fallacy. We ground our theoretical discussion and observations in an empirical study of US district court opinions resolving legal questions about copyright fair use and the lawyers’ briefs that led...
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Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should... more
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred norma...
Research Interests: Sociology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Epistemology, Humanities, and 14 moreRhetoric, Languages and Linguistics, Political Theory, Political Science, Public Deliberation, Argumentation, Argumentation Theory, Argumentation Theory and Critical Thinking, Public Policy Analysis, Informal Logic, Public Participation, Normative, Dialectics, and Public Policy
Research Interests: Criminology, Psychology, Law, Criminal Law, Law and Society, and 14 moreMedicolegal Issues, Sex Offenders, Social Science Research Network, Resistance, Recidivism, Othering, Pedophilia, Civil Commitment, Paraphilia, Sex Offender, Medical Jurisprudence, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Statute, and constitutionality
Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photographers take? Who owns the copyrights in the text and other content in real estate listings? What can listing brokers and multiple listing... more
Who owns the copyrights in the listing photos that real estate salespeople and independent photographers take? Who owns the copyrights in the text and other content in real estate listings? What can listing brokers and multiple listing services do to enhance and protect listing brokers\u27 rights in their listing-content portfolios? This book provides a comprehensive overview of legal issues relating to copyrights in real estate listings. Brian Larson and Mitchell Skinner, leading attorneys for real estate brokerages, multiple listing services, and REALTOR(r) associations nationwide, begin with the basics of copyright law applied to the real estate context and then step through all the key issues, including portfolio strategies, registration, and enforcement. This book is a unique and essential resource for anyone working with real estate listing content
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Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of using live streaming technology, citing that although live streaming has a broadcasting capability, it is not regulated by the Federal... more
Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of using live streaming technology, citing that although live streaming has a broadcasting capability, it is not regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, unlike other broadcasting media such as radio or television. Without this regulation, live streaming is opened up for broad use and misuse, including broadcasts of horrifying incidents such as the mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, sparking outrage and fear about the technology. Contributors provide a pathway to move forward with ethical and legal use of live streaming by analyzing the wide spectrum of critical issues through the lens of communication, ethics, and law. Scholars of legal studies, ethics, communication, and media studies will find this book particularly useful
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This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to... more
This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. We added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.
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This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory.... more
This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and a concluding phase. Those phases are the umbrella under which discrete argumentation phases occur at points we call stases. Whenever litigants seek a ruling or judgment, they reach a stasis—a stopping or standing point for arguing procedural points of disagreement. During these stases, the parties make arguments that fall...
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisor: Mary Schuster. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 334 pages + 1 zip file of supplementary materials
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The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound impacts on our lives. Understanding those practices in light of theories of reasoning and argumentation is thus critical for understanding law... more
The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound impacts on our lives. Understanding those practices in light of theories of reasoning and argumentation is thus critical for understanding law and the society it shapes. An inquiry that explores the very foundations of all legal reasoning leads to a broad, important question: How do lawyers and judges use cited cases in their legal arguments? It turns out there is practically no empirical research to suggest the answer. As the first step in a comprehensive empirical effort to answer this question, this article performs a ground-breaking analysis of a carefully constructed corpus of judicial opinions and the advocates’ briefs that gave rise to them. It tells us not just that these textual artifacts cited court opinions, but how they used the opinions in their reasoning. The article then reveals whether judges and advocates placed different values on different ways of using cited cases. These practitioners used them to make assertions about legal rules in their arguments about twice as often as they used them as legal analogies and about four times as often as they used them to make policy arguments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the practices of judges differed significantly from those of advocates. But so, too, did those of the prevailing advocates and their less fortunate opponents. On functional grounds, therefore, this article empirically supports the claim that there is a hierarchy of rational legal argumentative appeals, and that there is a common look to the ‘losing brief.’ This special convergence between theory and function can transform ongoing debates across legal scholarship on the value of drawing on precedent as a tool for rational persuasion.
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This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory.... more
This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants' differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and a concluding phase. Those phases are the umbrella under which discrete argumentation phases occur at points we call stases. Whenever litigants seek a ruling or judgment, they reach a stasis-a stopping or standing point for arguing procedural points of disagreement. During these stases, the parties make arguments that fall into predictable "commonplace" argument types. Taken together, these stock argument types form a taxonomy of arguments for all civil cases. Our claim that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a system for argumentation is novel, as is our claim that civil cases breed a taxonomy of argument types. These claims also mark the beginning of a broader project. Starting here with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, we embark on a journey that we expect to follow for several years (and which we hope other scholars will join), exploring our model's application across dispute resolution systems and using it to make normative claims about those systems. From a birds-eye view, this Article also represents a short modern trek in a much longer journey begun by advocates in city states in and near Greece nearly 2500 years ago.
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We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these... more
We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, anti-social personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. We also found that this group attempted to resist othering by rhetorical strategies such as providing evidence of change in character, distinction within the othered group, and proof of internal controls over unacceptable impulses. Finally, we discovered that such othering relies heavily on medical expertise, even though some medical practitioners may disagree with, or be hesitant in, their roles in this medico-legal collaboration.
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Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deductive syllogism, and called “no kind of reasoning at all” by Judge Posner. Arguments by legal analogy happen every day in courtrooms, law... more
Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deductive syllogism, and called “no kind of reasoning at all” by Judge Posner. Arguments by legal analogy happen every day in courtrooms, law offices, and law-school classrooms, and they are the essence of what we mean when we talk of thinking like a lawyer. But we have no productive and normative theory for creating and evaluating them. Entries in the debate over the last 25 years by Professors Sunstein, Schauer, Brewer, Weinreb, and others leave us at an impasse: The ‘skeptics’ are too focused on the rational force offered by the deductive syllogism when they should attend to the kinds of arguments that can provide premises for deduction—exactly the work that legal analogy does. Meanwhile, the ‘mystics’ expect us to accept legal analogy without an account of how to discipline it. Using the argumentation schemes and critical questions of informal logic, this article constructs a theory grounded in philosophy but kitted out for action. Not skeptic or mystic, it is dynamic.
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(Full text of paper available at https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1251/) In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and... more
(Full text of paper available at https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1251/)
In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (RT), an approach to experimental pragmatics grounded in cognitive science, offers the bridge. I begin by reviewing Gricean pragmatics and its incompatibility with rhetoric and cognitive science. I then sketch RT, but importantly, I identify revisions to RT that make it a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, a cognitive pragmatic rhetorical (CPR) theory. CPR theory strengthens RT by clarifying what it means to be relevant—and irrelevant—in relevance- theoretic terms. Meanwhile, it provides rhetoric a set of principles for its functioning grounded in cognitive science. I conclude with sample CPR-theoretic analyses.
In this chapter, I bridge rhetoric and pragmatics, both of which concern themselves with language-in-use and meaning-making beyond formal syntax and semantics. Previous efforts to link these fields have failed, but Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (RT), an approach to experimental pragmatics grounded in cognitive science, offers the bridge. I begin by reviewing Gricean pragmatics and its incompatibility with rhetoric and cognitive science. I then sketch RT, but importantly, I identify revisions to RT that make it a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, a cognitive pragmatic rhetorical (CPR) theory. CPR theory strengthens RT by clarifying what it means to be relevant—and irrelevant—in relevance- theoretic terms. Meanwhile, it provides rhetoric a set of principles for its functioning grounded in cognitive science. I conclude with sample CPR-theoretic analyses.
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Researchers and practitioners in natural-language processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results.... more
Researchers and practitioners in natural-language processing (NLP) and related fields should attend to ethical principles in study design, ascription of categories/variables to study participants, and reporting of findings or results. This paper discusses theoretical and ethical frameworks for using gender as a variable in NLP studies and proposes four guidelines for researchers and practitioners. The principles outlined here should guide practitioners , researchers, and peer reviewers, and they may be applicable to other social categories, such as race, applied to human beings connected to NLP research.
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Some studies have found characteristics of written texts that vary with author gender, echoing popular beliefs about essential gender differences that are reinforced in popular works of some scholarly authors. This article reports a study... more
Some studies have found characteristics of written texts that vary with author gender, echoing popular beliefs about essential gender differences that are reinforced in popular works of some scholarly authors. This article reports a study examining texts (N = 193) written in the same genre—a legal memorandum—by women and men with similar training in production of this type of discourse— the first year of U.S. law school—and finds no difference between them on the involved–informational dimension of linguistic register developed by Biber. These findings provide quantitative data opposing essentialist narratives of gender difference in communication. This essay considers relevance theory as a framework for understanding the interaction, exhibited in this and previous studies, of genre knowledge and gendered communicative performances.
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Brian Larson and Christopher Soper, The Structured Writing Group: A Different Writing Center, 29 The Second Draft 8-12, spring 2016. This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the... more
Brian Larson and Christopher Soper, The Structured Writing Group: A Different Writing Center, 29 The Second Draft 8-12, spring 2016.
This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. They added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.
This article describes the objectives, development, and some preliminary results of a program the authors led at the University of Minnesota Law School in academic year 2014-15. They wanted the “Structured Writing Group” (SWG) project to achieve some outcomes traditionally associated with writing centers: first, improving the student writing process by facilitating collaboration with a writing expert; and second, exposing students to additional audiences for their writing. They added a third goal of improving the experience and performance of multilingual students in the legal writing program.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should... more
Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.