The University of Alabama Press has just published "Rhetorical Knowledge in Legal Practice and Critical Legal Theory," by Francis J. Mootz III, a professor of law at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law. The book is part of the series, "Rhetoric, Culture and Social Critique."
This book extends Mootz's previous research into the nature of legal reasoning, and uses as examples the contentious legal disputes about affirmative action, gay rights, and the prosecutions of Jack Kevorkian for assisted suicide. Mootz draws principally on the work of philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chaim Perelman and Friedrich Nietzsche to assess these disputes.
Mootz is a regular presenter at academic symposia focusing on issues of legal theory, and he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the interdisciplinary journal, "Law, Culture and the Humanities." On Sept. 13, Gov. Edward G. Rendell appointed him to be a member of the Board of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, which seeks to clarify, modernize, and render uniform the law in numerous doctrinal areas.
Mootz has been a full-time member of the law school since Aug. 2000, and from Jan. 2004 until Jan. 2006, he served as associate dean for academic affairs. He teaches contract law, sales, payment systems, employment law and insurance law, and is the faculty adviser to the "Environmental Law Review" and the Law and Philosophy Society.