Law. I owe many thanks to Dean Peter Glenn for his enthusiastic support of this and other research projects, which were made possible by the award of a summer research stipend. I would also like to thank Andrew Tillapaugh, Class of 2002, for his dedicated research assistance and helpful conversations as I developed this topic, and to Carrie Leslie, Class of 2002, for research assistance in the final stage of the project. I received many helpful comments from colleagues when I presented this paper at a faculty colloquium, and I especially wanted to thank my colleague, Mike Navin, for his spirited critique of my thesis. Tom Baker provided some incisive comments, suggestions, and criticisms in an effort to strengthen my thesis, for which I am grateful. Hoyd Wilson of McCary, Wilson, & Pryor, P.C. in Albuquerque, New Mexico provided extensive comments "from the trenches" that I found very helpful. Most important, I am grateful to Jeff Stempel for his very helpful comments on a draft and for his kind invitation to join in this project and to have the honor of submitting these thoughts alongside the essays of a distinguished group of insurance law scholars and practitioners.
Vico insisted that the art of making arguments through an inventive use of commonplaces "is by nature prior to the judgment of their validity," and so the art of rhetoric should be granted priority over critical analysis 9. STUDY METHODS, supra note 2, at 15. 10. Id. at 35.
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Printed on acid-free paperSpringer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) v This book on semiotics of law in legal education is not a theoretical essay about semiotics or pedagogy. Rather, this is a study of the educational experiences in a seminar course, including reflections on the issues involved and fragmentary results rather than presenting a comprehensive theory. The subject of legal semiotics-the scientific approach that regards law as a system of signs and meanings-is not a topic in the programs of US or EU Law Schools, although signs and meanings are at home in the context of laws of different national, political and cultural character. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves within a program of the Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University. That University harbored extensive legal semiotic research by Roberta Kevelson, then Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at its Berks campus in the last decades of the twentieth century. The actual Seminar is named in her honor. Teachers, collegially interested scholars and students contributed texts that are written to deepen the insight of lawyers and laymen alike. All of the participants in the seminar experienced the power of semiotic analyses and the need to become aware of law's limitless potency to create meanings.
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