Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1983
Abstract
In what follows I shall analyze Plato's text and do my best to suggest a response to it. But I should say at the outset that for the modern lawyer and law teacher this is not merely an academic exercise, for we in fact are rhetoricians very much as Plato defines them. What is at stake for us in reading this dialogue is what it means to have devoted ourselves to the set of social and intellectual practices that define the profession of law. We have a special relation to this text, for we can in the full Platonic sense be refuted by it. In this crucial sense, the Gorgias is in my view the best and most powerful work I know on a subject usually talked about in other and very dreary terms, under the heading of "legal ethics."
Recommended Citation
White, James Boyd. "The Ethics of Argument: Plato's Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer." U. Chi. L. Rev. 50 (1983): 849-95.