LPC

Let's talk

thinking out Loud

Culver's interdisciplinary research and scholarship focuses broadly on identity performance in the legal profession.

Identity Performance and Cultural Awareness

Her work first explores identity performance and cultural awareness through co-cultural theory—a formative communication theory that legal scholars have largely overlooked. Rooted in anthropology and feminist communication, this theory provides a micro-analysis of how non-dominant cultures communicate and negotiate their identity within dominant cultures.

Culver's scholarship represents the first extension of co-cultural theory into legal studies, introducing her coined term "conscious identity performance" to examine the performance strategies lawyers employ.

Her goal is to integrate identity conversations into legal education, empowering students toward cultural consciousness through comprehensive identity performance tools.

Identity Performance and Legal Analysis

Second, her work examines identity performance within legal analysis itself. Drawing from contemporary argumentation theory, Culver argues that legal analysis achieves maximum effectiveness through pedagogy grounded in rhetoric and argumentation. To advance this approach, she developed a Rhetorical Praxis that modernizes the classical rhetorical canons for effective legal analysis.

What I've Shared

My research is fully engaged in ongoing discovery of cultural awareness, identity performance, and raising consciousness in the legal profession-- both in its members and in legal analysis.

The Roots of Reasoning: An Analysis of IRAC’s Reductive Framework and the Restoration of the Rhetorical Foundation

__ SETON HALL L. REV. ___ (forthcoming 2026).

#IncludeTheirStories: Rethinking, Reimagining, and Reshaping Legal Education (with Dean Elizabeth Kronk- Warner

2022 UTAH L. REV. 709 (2022).

(Un)Wicked Analytical Frameworks and the Cry for Identity,

21 NEV. L. J. 655 (2021).

Broken Landscapes, Black Beauty, in Racism, Regulation, and the Administrative State

THE REGULATORY REV. (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School) (Nov. 10, 2020);

No Matter How Loud I Shout: Legal Writing as Gender Sidelining

69 J. LEGAL EDUC. 31 (2019).

Conscious Identity Performance

55 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 577 (2018).

My Enemy’s Enemy and the Case for Rhetoric

15 LEGAL COMM. & RHETORIC: JALWD 293 (2018).

The Rise of Self Sidelining

39 WOMEN’S RTS. L. REP. 173 (2018).

White Doors, Black Footsteps: Leveraging White Privilege to Benefit Law Students of Color

21 J. GENDER, RACE & JUSTICE 37 (2017).

What I'm Wrestling With

These are some of the ideas I'm developing and questions that keep me curious.

In a forthcoming chapter in THRESHOLD CONCEPTS IN LEGAL WRITING: THE DISCIPLINARY NORMS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION (Kristen Tiscione & Melissa Weresh, eds. forthcoming 2026), I argue that legal precedent serves as the site where competing claims are evaluated for validity, and that analogical reasoning is the primary tool legal writers use to establish the validity of their arguments.

I'm exploring how classical stasis theory, operationalized as dimensional analysis, can provide law students with a diagnostic framework for understanding how the type of legal controversy determines case selection and argumentation across inductive, analogical, and deductive reasoning—addressing legal education's long severance from classical rhetoric's systematic approach to invention.

 
 
 
 

In collaborative work with a colleague in South Africa, we are examining how identity performance—a Western concept—manifests both explicitly and implicitly in South African contexts, particularly in relation to the "west is best, white is right" mentality, and exploring pathways to resist such conformity while restoring human dignity.