Law Commons^™

Breaking The Rules, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Breaking the Rules” is a legal research and writing assignment that I crafted for students completing their first year of law school. The assignment honors new students’ desire for skills that will allow them to effectively challenge the status quo of settled but discriminatory legal rules. Part I of this article is an essay that contextualizes and explains the assignment; Part II provides the assignment itself.

Practicing The Be Practice Ready: Making Competent Legal Researchers Using The New Process And Practice Method, Jason Murray

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The 'Other' Market, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The hiring market for tenure-track non–legal writing positions is a world unto itself with its own lingo (i.e., “meat market” and “FAR form”), its own unwritten rules (i.e., “Do not have two first-year courses in your preferred teaching package.”), and carefully calibrated expectations for candidates and schools with respect to the process and timing of hiring. These norms and expectations are disseminated to the participants in this market through a relatively well-established set of feeder fellowships, visiting assistant professor programs, elite law schools, blogs, and academic literature on the subject.

But there is another market that goes on every year …

Ask A Director Making The Library More Accessable, Lorelle Anderson

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Diversity With A "Culture Box" In First-Year Legal Writing, Ann N. Sinsheimer

Articles

Studying law is in many ways like studying another culture. Students often feel as though they are learning a new language with unfamiliar vocabulary and different styles of communication. Throughout their legal education, students are also exposed to a profession comprised of unique traditions and expectations. As a result, learning law takes time and energy. It can be both engaging and frustrating and may even challenge some of students’ values and belief systems. To ease her students’ transition to law school, the author starts her course each year with a “culture box” exercise, which encourages students to examine who they …

Best Practices For Teaching Advanced Legal Research Asynchronously Online, Khelani Clay, Shannon M. Roddy

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Practice And Fitness Making Writing Perfection More Nearly Attainable, Heather Ridenour, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

Articles

This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

Playing To The Audience, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

A Law Clinic Systems Theory And The Pedagogy Of Interaction: Creating Legal Learning System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This article introduces a clinical systems approach that reframes professional experience as an interaction with a professional environment. The article encourages clinical faculty and other legal educators to contemplate the pedagogy of systemic interaction when teaching from experience and to then expand professional interactive opportunities within the short period of student participation. Clinical systems theory operates on the premise that students should reframe how they look at their surroundings so that the challenges that make up their professional system are not seen as problems but as means to a solution. Reframing by the student is realized in a clinical system …

Does Westlawnext Really Change Everything: The Implications Of Westlawnext On Legal Research, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

WestlawNext, Thomson Reuters’ newest electronic research service, has been around for over a year now. Ron Wheeler shares his thoughts on how this service may impact various aspects of legal research, and he suggests further study and research are necessary to fully evaluate and comprehend the system.

Creac Scramble: An Active Self-Assessment Exercise, Meredith Aden

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Grooming Good Legal Writers Through Tailored, Constructive Feedback, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Learning By Doing: An Experience With Outcomes Assessment, Mary Crossley, Lu-In Wang

Articles

An emphasis on assessment and outcomes measures is a drum beat that is growing louder in American legal education. Prompted initially by the demands of regional university accreditation bodies, the attention paid to outcomes assessment is now growing with the forecast that the ABA will revise its accreditation standards to incorporate outcomes measures. For the past three years, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law has been developing a system for assessing the learning outcomes of its students. By describing our experience here at Pitt Law, with both its high and low points, we hope to suggest some helpful pointers …

Not Just Key Numbers And Keywords Anymore: How User Interface Design Affects Legal Research, Julie M. Jones

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal research is one of the foundational skills for the practice of law. Yet law school graduates are frequently admitted to the bar without adequate competence in this area. Applying both information-foraging theory and current standards for optimal web design, Ms. Jones considers, through a heuristic analysis, whether the user interfaces of Westlaw and LexisNexis help or hinder the process of legal research and the development of effective research skills.

Toward A Deeper Understanding Of Professionalism: Learning To Write And Writing To Learn During The First Two Weeks Of Law School, Ben Bratman

Articles

Law schools are under pressure to instill in their students a sense of professionalism, but what exactly does professionalism mean? And what can professors of legal writing do to lay an educational foundation of professionalism? They are, after all, the teachers who at most schools have the greatest interaction with the impressionable first-year students.

Professionalism is frequently used to mean a variety of behaviors that are important for lawyers to exhibit, but that are also important for those in business - outside the traditional professions - to exhibit. In the context of legal education, professionalism is better understood to mean …

Legal Research And Legal Education In Africa: The Challenge For Information Literacy, Vicki Lawal

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This paper analyses legal research within the context of legal education in Africa, it examines some of the challenges of electronic legal research in view of the influences of online legal electronic resources and Computer Assisted legal Research (CALR) and the importance of information literacy in addressing some of the issues raised especially with regards to undergraduate legal education.

Keynote Address: Remarks At The Workshop On Tapping Into The World Of Electronic Legal Knowledge , Muna Ndulo

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

Professor Muna Ndulo of Cornell Law School presented the keynote address at the 2007 Starr Workshop, “Tapping into the World of Electronic Legal Knowledge.” The workshop took place at Cornell Law School October 7-10, 2007 and was co-sponsored by the Starr Foundation, New York University Law Library, and Cornell Law Library.

Professor Ndulo addresses the topic of new information technologies and their importance to legal research and teaching.

U.S. Law And Legal Research, Pat Court

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This presentation on the basics of U.S. law offers a general outline of the fundamental sources of U.S. law. With a foundation in the three branches of government and the laws, court decisions, and regulations that flow from them, the speaker demonstrated free and fee-based electronic resources frequently used for legal research. The focus is on Westlaw, LexisNexis, PACER the Public Access to Court Electronic Records), GPOAccess, and the official U.S. Supreme Court web site. While the web has made it possible for universities, governments, courts, and others to put user-friendly law on the web for free, the most extensive …

Embracing The Writing-Centered Legal Process, Suzanne Ehrenberg

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Education, Professionalism, And The Public Interest, Alfred C. Aman Jr.

Alfred Aman Jr. (1991-2002)

No abstract provided.

Teaching Upperclass Writing: Everything You Always Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

A survey conducted as part of this project reveals that law schools generally require their students to have an upperclass writing experience taught or supervised by non-writing tenured or tenure-track faculty. These teachers currently bear the responsibility for assigning, supervising, reviewing, and evaluating most of the writing by upperclass students, either through substantive seminars or independent study projects. In almost all schools there is no major curricular planning, systematic instruction, faculty training, or institutional support for upperclass writing.

Playing Beyond The Rules: A Realist And Rhetoric-Based Approach To Researching The Law And Solving Legal Problems, Thomas Michael Mcdonnell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The proposed realist and rhetorical approach to legal research applies to every conceivable legal problem and provides the student a conceptual foundation not only for solving any legal dispute, but for successfully completing any transactions with which he or she will be confronted. Part I of this article will demonstrate why law students should learn to research the relevant audiences in the legal drama and to research the unpublished and often unwritten rules and practices that these audiences follow. Part II will show how. Part III will present a comprehensive legal problem solving model that integrates these new dimensions of …

Scholarship About Teaching, Jonathan L. Entin

Faculty Publications

This essay draws on that experience, focusing on approximately half a dozen particularly good articles that have appeared in the Journal during my editorial tenure. Most of these describe new ideas, offering detailed information for the curious reader who might want to emulate the author's approach or simply to learn what others in the legal academy are doing. Typically, however, these papers contain little or no meaningful assessment or evaluation. "Descriptive" is too often a pejorative term of dismissal. But good description is often an essential first step toward understanding. Because I believe that more rigorous evaluation could add to …

Writing Our Lives: Making Introspective Writing A Part Of Legal Education, James R. Elkins

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Writing Through Substance: The Integration Of Legal Writing With All Deliberate Speed, Michelle S. Simon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The stated pedagogical task of the first year of law school is to teach students to "think like lawyers." Legal writing, which is a traditional first-year course, serves this purpose by helping students develop writing and analytical skills that are essential to their ultimate success as lawyers. The greatest difficulty faced by those who teach legal writing, however, is communicating to students that legal writing is a means towards synthesizing the law and preparing them for the complex legal and human problems of modern law practice. To help overcome this difficulty, Pace Law School has developed a course that fully …

Law Students Make Valid Point With Protest, Jill Miller

Bryant Garth (1986-1987 Acting; 1987-1990)

No abstract provided.

Joining Hands And Smarts: Teaching Manual Legal Research Through Collaborative Learning Groups, Thomas Michael Mcdonnell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

My hypothesis was that a group of law students who research a problem together will learn legal research better than students who work individually. I further hypothesized that if the group research could be undertaken during class time under the direct supervision of the instructor and the teaching assistant, the students would be less intimidated by manual research tools and would be better prepared to work on their own. The following three-step method was employed: (1) the students read about the tool; (2) the instructor discussed the tool in class; and (3) immediately following the discussion, students went to the …

A Hurried Perspective On The Critical Legal Studies Movement: The Marx Brothers Assault The Citadel, Maurice J. Holland

Maurice James Holland (1984-1985 Acting; 1986 Acting)

No abstract provided.

Effective Communication - A Necessary Skill, Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Powell Speeches

University of South Carolina Law School, Columbia, South Carolina