The “Lawyer Style” in Leftist Rhetoric

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

It all followed a formulaic sequence. Within minutes of SCOTUS announcing the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, left-leaning Americans began posting memes. “Women are sick of this treatment!” “Women will withhold household services until we’re treated with appropriate respect!” “Women have had enough of this shit, and if you haven’t, why not?”

Then, with almost clockwork regularity, other left-leaning Americans swooped in, scolding the first bunch for their casual use of the word “women.” Not everybody who identifies as female, in today’s more inclusive society, is capable of becoming pregnant, and vice versa.This definition of “women” that makes gender synonymous with biological sex undercuts important progress made in recent years toward including transgendered people in the social fabric.

I’m not unsympathetic with either position. The first batch of arguers needed a tactic that was short and punchy enough to fit into an image macro, because people reading online have a very short attention span. (I’m under no illusions; not many people read my essays.) The second batch wanted a subtle, nuanced definition inclusive of how people figure themselves and want others to perceive them. Neither position is unreasonable.

Just as I managed to swallow my objection to this useless fight, however, another arose. If having a dog in the Dobbs fight requires having a fertile uterus, this third position asked, how do we include those born female, but without functioning uteri? The United States practiced forced sterilization on racial minorities as recently as the 1970s, and on prisoners as recently as 2010. By separating a funcional uterus from womanhood, the well-meaning were perpetuating their own injustice.

This argument neatly encapsulates my problem with partisan politics today. While the political Right often works by finding the worst possible example of whatever out-group they currently like, and ginning up outrage and moral lather, the political Left descends into infighting over definitions of terms. Thus the Right gathers followers who, by necessity, don’t examine questions more deeply, because depth and nuance are often the opposite of emotional engagement.

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

Please don’t mistake me; this slow, deliberative approach is frequently necessary. I call this approach “the lawyer style” because, in courts and legal documents, language must be parsed in ways that exclude ambiguity. Anybody who’s read contracts, leases, or loan agreements recently, already knows that legal documents require clear definitions in the opening paragraphs. Without agreed definitions, the resulting agreement will be vulnerable to endless, costly litigation.

But law courts differ from the court of public opinion. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes, people make moral decisions almost instantly; all subsequent moral reasoning happens to justify that instantaneous decision. When the Right offers easy, emotionally inflammatory terms, they permit their followers to take sides without needing to think. When Leftists start arguing among themselves over definitions of terms, they relinquish that magic moment of instant reaction.

Saying “women” to mean “that class of humans capable of becoming pregnant, with all the attendant risks and costs that experience carries,” is not accurate in all situations. There are times when it’s important to acknowledge that womanhood isn’t necessarily synonymous with having a certain set of natural-born genitals. Even those conservatives obsessed with concepts like “traditional manhood” tacitly acknowledge that gender is as much about roles as about biology.

However, in mustering the force to resist the ham-handed state intervention in sexual decisions that will inevitably follow the Dobbs decision, it’s necessary to become less specific. It’s necessary, from a rhetorical perspective, to use terms and language which permit people to have an emotional reaction. Because without that reaction, they won’t care enough to become involved—a price we’re already paying in some political arenas.

Back in college, I read Plato’s Euthyphro, a very short dialog where Socrates challenges the titular Euthyphro to define “piety.” When Euthyphro offers a definition that’s specific to his current legal case, Socrates is able to challenge the definition because it isn’t portable. But when Euthyphro offers a more general, inclusive definition, Socrates also challenges it, because it’s excessively sweeping, and unscrupulous actors could find ways to make it fit whatever they wanted.

Reading that dialog, I learned something important: evidence is often the opposite of persuasion. It isn’t enough to muster the facts, especially when your intended audience gets lost in meaningless definitions of terms and loses the unifying moral thread of your argument. Sometimes, in persuading the larger crowd, it’s better to be inexact, to surrender the false goal of precise language. Unless you’re in court, speaking lawyer-ese won’t help anyone.