ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that 'art' understood in Aristotelian terms, as techne, differs from the 'art' associated with the Law and Literature movement in that it focuses not on the interpretation of text but on its production. In the female welder's case not on her assessment of her circumstances but on the swift, improvised, and effective intervention that altered them. The chapter provides a fuller history of techne both pre- and post-Aristotle, and pair it with a brief joint history of rhetoric and law. It focuses on rhetoric's evolution from techne to 'technology,' and on law's related 'divorce' from rhetoric, through trends in perceptions of the nature of style that become visible in the development of a rhetorical heuristic known since shortly after Aristotle as stasis. Stasis is not, of course, the only rhetorical heuristic available for this purpose; it is, however, a particularly visible system whose use for legal argumentation over several centuries augurs well for its use.
