Lawyering Theory
In 1991 a multidisciplinary group led by Anthony Amsterdam, cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner, and Peggy Cooper Davis began a program of research and faculty-student colloquia at NYU School of Law designed to deepen understanding about disciplines and pedagogies appropriate to the study of law as a socially interactive, culturally embedded practice. Using the Lawyering curriculum as an initial laboratory for its investigations, this project in lawyering theory produced scholarly explorations of the intellectual tasks entailed in lawyering work. Early examples of lawyering theory scholarship included analyses of strategies of argument in trial and appellate contexts, 1 as well as analyses of Lawyering simulations.2 Complementing this research, the Lawyering Theory Colloquium, offered for course credit to upper-division students, explores the interdisciplinary underpinnings of legal interpretation and advocacy. It has generated a theoretical approach, grounded in the work of categorization, narrative, and rhetorics, that attends to how these processes operate in, and are affected by, culture. To examine these processes and the ways in which lawyers, judges, and students of the law engage with them, the Colloquium has enlisted such wide-ranging branches of knowledge as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory.
1 See, e.g., Peggy Cooper Davis, "Performing Interpretation: A Legacy of Civil Rights Lawyering in Brown v. Board of Education," in Austin Sarat, ed., Race, Law, and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1997); Anthony G. Amsterdam, Thurgood Marshall's Image of the Blue-eyed Child in Brown [Brown v. Board of Education], 68 N.Y.U. L. REV. 226 (1993); Anthony G. Amsterdam and Randy Hertz, An Analysis of Closing Arguments to a Jury, 37 N.Y. L. SCH. L. REV. 55 (1992).
2 See, e.g., Peggy Cooper Davis, Law and Lawyering: Legal Studies with an Interactive Focus, 37 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 185 (1992); Peggy Cooper Davis, Contextual Legal Criticism: A Demonstration of Hierarchy and "Feminine" Style, 66 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1635 (1991); Anthony G. Amsterdam and Nancy Morawetz, "Cognitive Components in Argument Planning," in Minding The Law, Vol. II (forthcoming).