Meet the Pre-Law Advisor
Doug Coulson received his J.D. from Tulane Law School and, before pursuing his Ph.D., practiced general litigation in a large national law firm with a focus on complex business and commercial litigation. He remains a licensed attorney in Texas and continues to write for practicing lawyers as the author of the multi-volume West’s Texas Practice Guide: Business and Commercial Litigation and updates to the multi-volume Texas Business Litigation: Forms and Commentary. His experience in legal practice and legal scholarship informs his work with students interested in law school and the legal profession.
Coulson's research explores how legal language shapes justice, identity and power. More broadly, he's interested in argumentation and advocacy, law and the humanities, the relationship between rhetoric and violence, democratic deliberation and demagoguery, classical rhetoric, and comparative and historical methods. Across his work, he aims to foreground the historical and rhetorical conditions through which language includes and excludes, persuades and silences, celebrates and condemns.
Coulson is currently working on a book about demagoguery in judicial writing. In his most recently published book, "Judicial Rhapsodies: Rhetoric and Fundamental Rights in the Supreme Court" (Amherst, 2023), he examines the laudatory, even operatic, forms of writing Supreme Court justices have used to justify fundamental-rights decisions, arguing that such writing is not an aberration but a central feature of judicial discourse. His first book, "Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases" (SUNY Press, 2017), traces how the early U.S. naturalization system used racialized notions of threat and kinship to shape citizenship law.
His articles have also appeared in Rhetorica, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Legal Communication & Rhetoric, The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, and University of Miami Race and Social Justice Law Review.