The law-and-literature movement claims to have introduced a valuable pedagogical innovation into legal study: instructing students in techniques of literary analysis for the purpose of interpreting laws and in the reciprocal use of legal analysis for the purpose of interpreting literary texts.
Topic
Theories about the cause of the long-term drought in sub-Saharan West Africa, focusing on the "Northern Hemisphere cooling" hypothesis
Framework
Challenge Position
Main Point
Although some meteorologists attribute the sub-Saharan drought to a cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, the evidence actually does not support this cooling hypothesis. The Most Valuable Sentence: Appears in the first sentence of the last paragraph:
P1: Introduction of the Cooling Hypothesis
The passage opens by describing a prominent theory: some meteorologists think the persistent drought in sub-Saharan West Africa is mainly due to long-term climate change—specifically, that a cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere, from the mid-1940s to early 1970s, played a major role in causing the drought.
P2: Mechanism of the Hypothesis
Here the passage explains the details of how this cooling might work: cooler northern temperatures supposedly changed pressure patterns and pushed the circumpolar vortex (a band of winds) farther south, which then moved the rainfall/kicked the monsoon away from the sub-Sahara. There's also some concern that this could become a vicious cycle, as more snow and ice would reflect even more sunlight, intensifying cooling.
P3: Evidence Against the Hypothesis
Now the author pushes back: the facts don’t actually back up the cooling hypothesis. For instance, the region had plenty of rain during one of the biggest periods of Northern Hemisphere cooling (in the 1950s), and by the 1980s (when the drought was really bad), northern temperatures were going up again. Plus, more recent analyses of water temperatures make it even harder to claim the original cooling was that significant.