Innocenti, Beth2010-04-202010-04-202005Manolescu, Beth Innocenti. "Kames's Legal Career and Writings as Precedents for Elements of Criticism." Rhetorica 23 (2005): 239-59.https://hdl.handle.net/1808/6160This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from ‘Caliber’ (http://caliber.ucpress.net/) or ‘AnthroSource’ (http://www.aaanet.org/publications/anthrosource/).Scholars have seldom explored relationships among Lord Kames's legal career and writings and Elements of Criticism. After considering why Kames did not write a rhetoric of legal advocacy, I argue that Kames's legal career and writings offered precedents for Elements in three areas: fulfilling social aspirations, using principles of human nature for pedagogical purposes, and using a mode of reasoning that involved abstracting principles from particular cases. I provide a more complete understanding of the Elements and suggest that aims and methods of Scots law may have penetrated eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorics more broadly.en-USArticle10.1525/rh.2005.23.3.239openAccess