Law Commons^™

Blogs And The Legal Academy, Orin S. Kerr

Orin Kerr

This paper's focus is on today’s technology and ask whether blogs as we know them today are conducive to advancing scholarship. This paper's conclusion is that relative to other forms of communication, blogs do not provide a particularly good platform for advancing serious legal scholarship. The blog format focuses reader attention on recent thoughts rather than deep ones. The tyranny of reverse chronological order limits the scholarly usefulness of blogs by leading the reader to the latest instead of the best.

This doesn’t mean that blogs can’t advance scholarship. The impact of any blog depends on what its author decides …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Legal Research Instruction And Law Librarianship In China: An Updated View Of Current Practices And A Comparison With The U.S. Legal Education System, Ning Han, Liying Yu, Anne Mostad-Jensen

Ning Han

This article follows up on Liying Yu’s 2008 survey exploring the state of legal research instruction in Chinese law schools. The updated survey revisits the state of legal research instruction in China, explores several aspects not previously addressed, and discusses broader issues relevant to law librarianship in China such as management models, funding, staffing, and law librarian faculty status.

Assessing Academic Law Libraries' Performance And Implementing Change: The Reorganization Of A Law Library, Linda Kawaguchi

Linda Kawaguchi

Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Tips For Effective And Efficient Legal Research, Rebecca Mattson, Theresa K. Tarves

Theresa Tarves

Being a cost-effective researcher is not necessarily just about the legal research resources available where an attorney practices. Budgetary concerns are prevalent across all legal markets, from solos and public interest to large law firms. As the legal field struggles with clients who want greater efficiencies from their attorneys and alternative fee arrangements, many of which state that attorneys will not bill clients for legal research database fees, it is becoming more important than ever to teach law students and attorneys how to use alternative resources effectively and efficiently.

Why Can't I Just Use Lexis Or Westlaw? Promoting Lesser Known Legal Research Platforms To Law Students, Theresa K. Tarves

Theresa Tarves

It can be difficult to convince law students to try new resources outside of Westlaw and Lexis, especially when these two resources seemingly have it all from a law student’s perspective. How do we expose law students to lesser known legal research resources so that they can be well-informed researchers who do not become dependent on only a few resources to carry them through their entire legal careers?

Teaching Cost-Effective Research Skills: Tips For Effective And Efficient Legal Research, Rebecca Mattson, Theresa K. Tarves

Rebecca A. Mattson

Being a cost-effective researcher is not necessarily just about the legal research resources available where an attorney practices. Budgetary concerns are prevalent across all legal markets, from solos and public interest to large law firms. As the legal field struggles with clients who want greater efficiencies from their attorneys and alternative fee arrangements, many of which state that attorneys will not bill clients for legal research database fees, it is becoming more important than ever to teach law students and attorneys how to use alternative resources effectively and efficiently.

The Integrated Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

In January 2014, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education stated that “[a]n evolution is taking place in legal practice and legal education needs to evolve with it.” To this end, the Task Force recommended that the law school curriculum “needs to shift still further toward developing the competencies and professionalism required of people who will deliver services to clients.” In fact, the Task Force emphasized that “[a] graduate’s having some set of competencies in the delivery of law and related services, and not just some body of knowledge, is an essential outcome …

Filling The Google Gaps: Harnessing The Power Of Google Through Instruction, Rebecca Mattson

Rebecca A. Mattson

This article discusses teaching proper use of Google and Google Scholar in the legal research classroom.

Crowdsourced Coursebooks, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph T. Thai

Stephen E Henderson

Given increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. Working with a technology startup, we are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The …

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Lee Keene

Sherri Keene

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students’ and new attorneys’ knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close …

Cat, Cause, And Kant, Richard Peltz-Steele

Richard J. Peltz-Steele

These are precarious times in which to launch a new law school and a new law review. Yet here we are. The University of Massachusetts is now in its first year of operation with provisional ABA accreditation. This text is a foreword to the first general-interest issue of the University of Massachusetts Law Review. Now marks an appropriate time to take stock of what these institutions mean to accomplish in our unsettled legal world.

Teaching Westlawnext: Next Steps For Teachers Of Legal Research, Ronald Wheeler

Ronald E Wheeler

As a follow up to his earlier piece titled "Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything: The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research," Professor Wheeler here explores strategies for teaching students to effectively research using the WestlawNext legal research platform. He focuses on challenging law librarians and other teachers of legal research to embrace change, to innovate and to devise research exercises that highlight both the advantages and the alleged pitfalls of WestlawNext. In particular, Professor Wheeler discusses source selection, filters, addressing the volume of results, esoteric content, and Boolean searching.

Thinking Outside The Box: Publication Opportunities Beyond The Traditional Law Review, Susan Chesler, Anna Hemingway, Tamara Herrera

Anna P. Hemingway

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Keene

Sherri Keene

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening one’s knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close work on legal writing …

A Strategy For Teaching Objectivity To The Domestic Relations Student: Utilizing Psychodrama To Explore Attorney Empathy Toward Improving Family Law Outcomes, Bruce L. Beverly

Bruce L. Beverly

The basic domestic relations law course is often taught by the casebook method, with little reference to actual underlying human drama. In order to produce effective advocates, it is necessary for student to be brought out of the sterile case recitation model and into a role where the student experiences, in a controlled and directed fashion, some of the hardships faced by the players in a family law case. This article proposes that, in line with new emphasis on experiential learning and alternate learning styles, one might employ a psychodramatic approach to teaching the domestic relations course, in order to …

The "Reason Giving" Lawyer: An Ethical, Practical, And Pedagogical Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Whether as a matter of duty or utility, lawyers give reasons for their actions all the time. In the various venues in which legal skills must be employed, reason giving is required in some, expected in others, desired in many, and useful in most. This Essay underscores the pervasiveness of reason giving in the practice of law and the consequent necessity of lawyers developing a skill at giving reasons. This Essay examines reason giving as an innate human characteristic related directly to our need for answers and our constant yearning to understand the answer to the question “why.” It briefly …

It's Not Just A Writing Problem, Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

No abstract provided.

Making Irac Visible, Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus, Nancy Ellen Chanin

Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

No abstract provided.

Accomplishing Your Scholarly Agenda While Maximizing Students’ Learning (A.K.A., How To Teach Legal Methods And Have Time To Write Too), Anna P. Hemingway

Anna P. Hemingway

Law School As A Culture Of Conversation: Re-Imagining Legal Education As A Process Of Conversion To The Demands Of Authentic Conversation, Gregory A. Kalscheur S.J.

Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J.

Conventional wisdom holds that the principal task of a law school is to teach law students to "think like lawyers." However, law school can be experienced as a form of narrow training that diminishes something central to the human person: the fundamental drive to question and to follow those questions wherever they lead. This Article will explore the ways in which the thought of two scholars, Bernard Lonergan and James Boyd White, can usefully inform our understanding of this crisis of meaning and value within the context of a conception of law as a social and cultural activity. First, this …

Rebellious Lawyering, Regnant Lawyering, And Street-Level Bureaucracy, Paul R. Tremblay

Paul R. Tremblay

This Article explores the professional responsibilities of progressive lawyers representing the poor and disadvantaged. The author argues that lawyers representing the poor are generally good, energetic lawyers committed to social justice and lessening the pain of poverty. Subsequently, the defects found in poverty lawyering are structural, institutional, political, economic, and ethical. Therefore, the author posits that the mission of teachers and practitioners should be to develop practice patterns and proposals that account for the street-level experiences of legal services lawyers on the front lines. By examining the notions of rebellious and regnant lawyering, the author seeks to illuminate how these …

Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The day-to-day realities of different systems of government can be discerned in the way they handle, in theory and practice, clashes between the individual and the collective will. The structure of contemporary American democracy is no exception. It is comprised of a variegated assortment of judicial formulae for balancing the interests of the individual and the state, most of these formulae tracing back with differing degrees of directness to textual bases in the first nine amendments to the federal Constitution or their state constitutional equivalents. One of these basic structural balancings, encountered early on by every student of American law …

Environmental Law In The Political Ecosystem - Coping With The Reality Of Politics, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

In this Essay, the proposition the author draws from the narrative of the endangered species litigation is derivatively Aristotelian – that we must consciously, actively, and explicitly integrate an informed consideration of human politics into what we teach and do in environmental law. The proposition is not that we should steep ourselves in party politics, although there are interesting observations aplenty that could be made on the direct consequences that the two major parties (and occassionally their wistful smaller incarnations) have on the evolution of environmental law. The proposition offered here operates at two different levels: practical politics and political …

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …

Incorporating Bar Pass Strategies Into Routine Teaching Practices, Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

No abstract provided.

The Law Librarian's Role In The Scholarly Enterprise: Historical Development Of The Librarian/Research Partnership In American Law Schools, Michael Slinger, Rebecca Slinger

Michael J. Slinger

No abstract provided.

Making Effective Use Of Practitioners' Briefs In The Law School Curriculum, Anna Hemingway

Anna P. Hemingway

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark E. Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …