Law Commons^™

The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

I spend much of my time dealing with Supreme Court opinions. Usually, I download and read them the day that they are announced by the Court. I edit them for my casebook and teach them to my students. I write about them, lecture about them, and litigate about them. My focus, like I am sure most everyone's, is functional: I try to discern the holding, appraise the reasoning, ascertain the implications, and evaluate the decision's desirability. Increasingly, though, I have begun to think that this functional approach is overlooking a crucial aspect of Supreme Court decisions: their rhetoric. I use …

Reflections (On Law Review, Legal Education, Law Practice, And My Alma Mater), Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

It is an honor for me to offer some reflections in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Michigan Law Review. I have many fond memories of my time at the University of Michigan Law School, both as a law student and a member of the faculty. I was therefore pleased to accept the assignment to present the keynote address at the Centennial Celebration banquet. It is hard for me to believe that it has been almost 40 years since I was invited to serve on the Michigan Law Review. I remember it like it was yesterday, for it was …

Foreword, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

Why celebrate? Some people hate law reviews. They would think it unseemly to celebrate a centennial such as this. They might compare it to a 1448 celebration of the first hundred years of the Bubonic Plague. Their criticisms are familiar. Why do we entrust the development of the scholarly canon to second- and third-year law students? Why do law reviews publish really bad things and reject really good things? Why do they encourage a style of argument in which each article must begin by summarizing all that has been written before? Why do they insist that any assertion of fact, …

Foreword: Interdisciplinarity, Kathleen M. Sullivan

Michigan Law Review

In the beginning, there was law. Then came law-and. Law and society, law and economics, law and history, law and literature, law and philosophy, law and finance, statistics, game theory, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, critical theory, cultural studies, political theory, political science, organizational behavior, to name a few. The variety of extralegal disciplines represented in the books reviewed in this issue attests to this explosion of perspectives on the law in legal scholarship. This development makes clear that the vocation of the legal scholar has shifted from that of priest to theologian. No longer is a law professor successful by virtue …

Does Information And Agreement Equal Informed Consent?, Carl E. Schneider, Michael H. Farrell

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is based on a talk delivered last summer in England and on the chapter "Information, Decisions, and the Limits of Informed Consent," in (Michael Freeman and Andrew D. E. Lewis, eds.) Law and Medicine: Current Legal Issues 2000, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press, 2000). This version appears with permission of the publisher.

For many years, a principal labor of bioethics has been to find a way of confiding medical decisions to patients and not to doctors. The foremost mechanism for doing so has been the doctrine of informed consent. Anxious as bioethicists and courts have been to …

Breaking Into The Academy: The 2002-2004 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Guidance for individuals interested in becoming law professors.

"I Will Not Sit Idly By While My Future Is Determined:" The Response Of The University Of Michigan Black Law Students' Alliance To Grutter V. Bollinger, Et Al., The Black Law Students' Alliance

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Back in 1998, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law expressed support for the University of Michigan Law School's defense of its affirmative action policy, which is at controversy in Grutter v. Bollinger. Today, as in 1998, "[W]e certainly do not believe the Law School admissions policy truly addresses the inequalities within our law school and the legal profession generally. Legal education is unfortunately not a bastion of diversity." Women and students of color struggle to be heard and seen, and to achieve equal representation in both the study and practice of law. "Without active efforts, we cannot create …

The Logician Versus The Linguist- An Empirical Tale Of Functional Discrimination In The Legal Academy, Andrea Kayne Kaufman

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This paper, focusing exclusively on gender, asks whether male and female law students express different preferences for logic-based learning models. A wide variety of educational theories and other theories have been used to conceptualize different learning preferences among law students but until now, none has focused on logical intelligence compared with the other intelligences. Using Harvard educational psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, this paper describes an empirical study establishing that male and female law students express differences in preferring logical intelligence over the other intelligences. This paper introduces the concept of "functional discrimination," addressing the ways in which …