This volume offers the beginnings of an answer to the question: “How can we understand and intervene in contemporary legal practice using texts from the rhetorical tradition?” Here, the study of legal rhetoric is conceived as having a macro and a micro scale, much as a mosaic represents a picture, but it is made up of many small pebbles, tiles, or pieces of glass – tesserae. Some rhetorical texts embrace grand theories, sketching perhaps a broad expanse of a picture, but not filling in the tesserae. This volume is decidedly of another kind, depicting a variety of rhetorical traditions as applied to very specific rhetorical performances from the contemporary American legal tradition. This introduction first identifies a set of criteria for evaluating the utility of rhetorical traditions as tools for understanding contemporary legal practices. It then sketches a very brief and incomplete history of the interaction of these two fields. Finally, it describes the contributions of this volume.

[19.1] Statutes often operate for many years. Yet the passage of time may mean that a statute is operating in circumstances quite different to the circumstances in which it was enacted. The question is how these changes affect the interpretation of the statute. The principle of interpretation that a statute is to be interpreted as ‘always speaking’ is typically invoked in this context. It provides that, where appropriate, a word or phrase in a statute is to be construed as speaking continuously in the present. This means that it may be possible for statutory text to apply to a state of affairs or a legal environment that was not known or understood at the time the statute was enacted. The potential to construe statutory text as ‘always speaking’ is a matter of construction. In this context courts have emphasised the distinction between the connotation, or ‘essential’ meaning, of text, which does not change, and its denotation, or application, which may. If the essential meaning can be expressed at a sufficiently broad level, consistent with statutory purpose, then it may apply to a class of things or a state of affairs that exists at the time of interpretation, but not at the time of enactment.