Rhetorically constructing the United States law professor persona(e): Implications of traditional, invitational, and cooperative rhetorics

This dissertation studies lawyers' views of the ideal role(s) that the U.S. law professor should perform as legal educator. To conduct the study, the dissertation calls upon first persona theory to examine law review articles and other legal writings about lawyers' expectations produced since 1870, the year in which Harvard Law School planted the seeds for the current system of legal education in the United States.; As this study argues, the ideal role of the U.S. law professor has been a matter of ongoing controversy among lawyers. Indeed, lawyers have advocated various personae for the law professor: (1) the scholar, who is a full-time teacher, researcher, and sometimes public servant, but who often has limited practical experience; (2) the practitioner, who has a substantial number of years of practice at the bar and is prepared for hands-on lawyering instruction; and (3) the scholar/practitioner hybrid, who may be an academic now, but who had substantial practical experience in the past or who, while serving as an academic, still practices law on the side.; The lawyers who have constructed these personae generally have employed traditional Aristotelian rhetoric, or argumentation, a process that has contributed to much rhetorical clash and little rhetorical understanding. The research shows that lawyers who have expressed differing expectations of the ideal law professor role(s) have done so almost without addressing each other's underlying concerns.; While the first part of this study is descriptive, the second part is normative. Present-day lawyers involved in this communication conflict would benefit from employing another approach to rhetoric, beginning with invitational rhetoric, which is particularly well-suited for opening doors to understanding. However, since invitational rhetoric generally is not effective in decision-making situations and eventually lawyers would benefit from deciding if they are satisfied with the current law professor persona, the scholar persona, the dissertation suggests that ultimately lawyers in this conflict embrace cooperative rhetoric. Cooperative rhetoric, a hybrid approach, allows for both an attempt at understanding the views of other parties and also for argumentation about the merits of those views.