Law Commons^™

Akhil Amar’S Unusable Past, Gregory Ablavsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. By Akhil Reed Amar.

The Indian Child Welfare Act In The Multiverse, M. Alexander Pearl

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl By Matthew L.M. Fletcher and Kathryn E. Fort, in Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law 452, 471. Edited by Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R.A. Lenhardt and Angela Onwuachi-Willig.

Non-Lawyer Judges In Devalued Courts, Maureen Carroll

Reviews

Recent legal scholarship has shed needed light on the vast universe of litigation that occurs without lawyers. Large majorities of civil litigants lack representation, even in weighty matters such as eviction and termination of parental rights, raising a host of issues worthy of scholarly attention. For example, one recent article has examined racial and gendered effects of the lack of constitutionally guaranteed counsel in civil matters, and another has shown that judges tend not to reduce the complexity of the proceedings for the benefit of unrepresented parties. In Judging Without a J.D., Sara Greene and Kristen Renberg add an important …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz

Law & Economics Working Papers

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgements paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those …

Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …

Investigative Advocacy: The Mechanics Of Muckraking, Patrick Barry

Articles

This essay argues that drafting a complaint is a form of investigative advocacy and that the best of them uphold the tradition of muckraking journalism.

Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Great legal writing is about more than mechanics. But careful attention to legal writing mechanics is nevertheless critical for effective, clear, and persuasive writing. Proper grammar, usage, and correct punctuation makes analysis clearer and therefore more effective. It also shows the reader that the writer has paid close attention to detail, which makes the reader more likely to find the writer credible. Relatedly, communicating in plain language is critical to making sure that “readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” And proper citation—or even better, stylish citation—helps the reader easily understand what …

Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins

Other Publications

The overarching theme of Volume 19 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD is how legal communication shapes the law, and how doers of legal writing can use their resources to make it better. The volume begins with a fascinating article from Aaron Kirschenfeld and Alexa Chew, “Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts.” In their article, Professors Kirschenfeld and Chew shed light on whether the switch from print research to digital research has changed the way that law students and lawyers conduct research. To do so, the article uses the “citation stickiness” metric, which analyzes whether …

Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak

Other Publications

It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

Articles

I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry

Articles

Good writing, I often tell my students, is “anticipating the edits of your boss.” I then clarify that the definition of “boss” in that statement is intentionally expansive. A supervisor at work can count. A teacher in school can count. So can a valued customer or client. he key is to start thinking about two things: 1) the actual people who are going to review your writing; and 2) the likely changes they’ll make to it. By implementing those changes yourself— before the document ever hits your boss’s desk or inbox—you can save them a lot of time and cognitive …

Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry

Articles

Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.

Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …

Researching Administrative Law, Keith Lacy

Law Librarian Scholarship

Administrative law is a broad subject area concerning the laws and procedures governing administrative agencies. It also encompasses the substantive law produced by those agencies — most commonly in the form of regulations (rules) or agency decisions. This article highlights a few major resources for researching administrative law in the United States.

Editing And Interleaving, Patrick Barry

Articles

This essay suggests that a powerful learning strategy called "interleaving"--which involves strategically switching between cognitive tasks--is being underused. It can do more than make study sessions more productive; it can also make editing sessions more productive.

The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William Michael Treanor

Michigan Law Review

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to bring together the textual provisions that the Convention had previously agreed to and to prepare a final constitution. Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris drafted the document for the Committee, and, with few revisions and little debate, the Convention adopted Morris’s draft. For more than two hundred years, questions have been raised as to whether Morris covertly altered the text in order to advance his constitutional vision, but modern legal scholars and historians studying the Convention have either ignored the issue or concluded that Morris …

A Gendered Right To Counsel?, Maureen Carroll

Reviews

The civil and criminal justice systems are built on an adversarial model, but only in the criminal sphere does the defendant possess a constitutional right to representation at public expense. As a result, while representation is the default in criminal cases, more than three quarters of civil cases involve an unrepresented party.That disconnect flows from the Supreme Court’s decisions in Gideon v. Wainwright and Lassiter v. Department of Social Services. Gideon held that the Constitution guarantees a right to counsel for a defendant facing imprisonment for a criminal offense, regardless of the nature of the crime or the length of …

Noise Pollution, Patrick Barry

Law & Economics Working Papers

The authors of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment are a trio of intellectual heavy hitters: Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, constitutional law scholar Cass Sunstein, and former McKinsey consultant (and current management professor) Olivier Sibony. As prolific as they are prominent, the three of them have collectively produced over fifty books and hundreds of articles, including some of the most cited research in social science. If academic publishing ever becomes an Olympic sport, they’ll be prime medal contenders, particularly if they get to compete as a team or on a relay. Their combined coverage of law, economics, psychology, medicine, education, …

Foreword: From Personal Life To Private Law: The Jurisprudence Of John Gardner, Scott Hershovitz

Other Publications

John Gardner was a great philosopher. He was appointed as the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford when he was still quite junior in the profession. It was a big job. Ronald Dworkin held the post before Gardner, and H.L.A. Hart before him. Gardner delivered on his promise. He had wide-ranging interests. He wrote about jurisprudence, criminal law, and tort law. His pushed those fields forward—and others too. Gardner’s scholarship was incisive, creative, rigorous, generous, and witty. He had a knack for illuminating law and life too. In recent years, Gardner published two books that tackled tort law: From Personal Life …

Researching Marijuana Law, Seth Quidachay-Swan

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article provides a brief overview of the current legal framework governing the regulation of marijuana at the federal and state levels in the United States. It also provides an overview of the state of Michigan’s current regulatory framework and resources for attorneys interested in learning more about marijuana regulation.

Acknowledgements As A Window Into Legal Academia, Jonathan Tietz, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Legal scholarship in the United States is an oddity—an institution built on student editorship, a lack of peer review, and a dramatically high proportion of solo authorship. It is often argued that this makes legal scholarship fundamentally different from scholarship in other fields, which is largely peer-reviewed by academics. We use acknowledgments in biographical footnotes from law review articles to probe the nature of legal knowledge co-production and de facto peer review in the legal literature. Using a survey and a textual analysis of about thirty thousand law review articles from 2008 to 2017, we examined the nature of knowledge …

Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Joanne Sweeny

Other Publications

Volume 18 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD introduces the theme of author as travel guide who can transport their reader to new places. Lisa Eichhorn’s article, “Tonal Variation,” introduces the concept of tone, which is defined as the author’s attitude toward the audience. Using this frame, Professor Eichhorn explains how the author can use tone to shape the relationship with the reader. The article examines and contrasts two recent judicial opinions authored by Supreme Court Justices Kagan and Gorsuch. Through these tonal analyses, Professor Eichhorn shows how, even within an opinion, the tone may shift as the opinion moves …

Notes On Nuance: Volume 1, Patrick Barry

Books

To succeed in law, business, education, government, health care, and many other fields, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish yourself as a savvy communicator. Social media has only accelerated the ways in which we all must learn to use our words to connect, compete, and create. There are features of the English language, however, that many of us haven’t taken full advantage of yet. Notes on Nuance is designed to help change that.

Drawing on a diverse collection of authors—from novelists to physicists, from ancient Greek historians to modern-day CEOs—it reveals the hidden mechanics that skilled writers use to …

Good With Words: Speaking And Presenting, Patrick Barry

Books

Suppose you were good with words. Suppose when you decided to speak, the message you delivered—and the way you delivered it—successfully connected with your intended audience. What would that mean for your career prospects? What would that mean for your comfort level in social situations? And perhaps most importantly, what would that mean for your satisfaction with the personal relationships you value the most?

This book is designed to help you find out. Based on an award-winning course and workshop series at the University of Michigan taken by students training to enter a wide range of fields—law, business, medicine, social …

Children's Justice: How To Improve Legal Representation Of Children In The Child Welfare System, Don Duquette, Britany Orlebeke, Andrew Zinn, Robbin Pott, Ada Skyles, Xiaomeng Zhou

Books

From 2009 to 2016 the University of Michigan Law School served as the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). This seven-year, multimillion dollar project, directed by Clinical Professor Don Duquette, conducted a national needs assessment that identified a substantial consensus on the role and duties of the child’s lawyer. The needs assessment led to the QIC-ChildRep Best Practice Model, an update and expansion of the 1996 ABA Standards for Lawyers Representing Children in Child Abuse and Neglect Cases.

Released in 2016 as a300-page softcover book, CHILDREN'S JUSTICE is the final report …

Race And The First Amendment: A Compendium Of Resources, Solomon F. Worlds, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

This article provides summaries of law review articles and books that consider the complex relationship between racial justice and free speech. It seeks to assist law students, legal scholars, judges, and practitioners to think more deeply about the intersection between these critically important values. It describes scholarship that views these values as complementary, but also scholarship that views them as conflicting.

Judges Behaving Badly . . . Then Slinking Away, Maureen Carroll

Reviews

A federal judge is accused of misconduct and an investigation begins. Before the investigation has concluded, though, the judge leaves her post. What happens next? Does it create an accountability gap, and if so, how much should that concern us? These are the questions that Veronica Root Martinez takes up in Avoiding Judicial Discipline.

Numbers, Patrick Barry

Articles

Numbers can be numbing. Depend too much on them to make your case, pitch your product, or tell your story, and you risk losing your audience. This essay offers a way to way to use numbers—both large and small—in a manner that is at once more compelling and more concrete.

Incorporating Social Science Into Criminal Defense Practice, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

In recent decades, social scientists have created a treasure trove of empirical and sociological data that defenders can and should use to help their clients. Evidence rules, criminal law, and criminal procedure are filled with concepts informed by social science. When is evidence likely to unfairly prejudice a defendant in the eyes of a jury? Do police interact differently with members of minority populations and how should that inform concepts of reasonableness? How easy or difficult is it for people to identify individuals they see during high-stress criminal episodes? How effective are police interrogation tactics at getting at the truth …