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Full-Text Articles in Law
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Judicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even …
From Snail Mail To E-Mail: The Traditional Legal Memorandum In The Twenty-First Century, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
From Snail Mail To E-Mail: The Traditional Legal Memorandum In The Twenty-First Century, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Traditional legal memoranda have been used to teach objective analysis since the inception of legal writing programs in the 1970's. The continued use of these memoranda in the legal writing classroom leads law students to believe that traditional memoranda are still the primary form of communication between attorney and client. A 2006 survey of Georgetown University Law Center graduates, however, suggests that the traditional legal memorandum is all but dead in law practice. Seventy-five percent of the graduates surveyed said they write no more than three traditional memoranda per year. Instead, these graduates are more likely to communicate with clients …