Law Commons^™

Law Library: 1859-2017, Barbara H. Garavaglia

Book Chapters

The Law Library was established in 1859 as part of the Law Department and continues to be "maintained and administered as a part of the instruction and research operation of the Law School." The library has been considered the "apparatus" of the Law Department and "the lawyer's laboratory." Indeed, this underlying view led the library to build a comprehensive collection that would provide "the means necessary for original investigation" and "permit scholars to do research work in any field of law, regardless of country or period." The collection development policy--to collect primary sources of law: statutes, civil law codes, court …

The Law School (2013), Margaret A. Leary

Book Chapters

This chapter describes the growth and changes to the University of Michigan Law School for the period 1973-2013.

Teaching Legal History Through Legal Skills., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

I revolve my legal history courses around one methodology: teaching legal history by means of legal skills. I draw on my experience teaching legal practice and clinical skills courses to assign briefs and oral arguments as a means for law students to immerse themselves in historical topics. Without distracting from other approaches, I framed this innovation as teaching legal history not to budding historians but to budding lawyers.

The Cultural Background Of The Legal Imagination, James Boyd White

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I want to speak in this essay about one aspect of the origins of what is often called the law and literature movement in the United States, namely, how it got going. I shall do this by explaining the aims and assumptions of my own early contribution to it in the form of The Legal Imagination (first published in 1973). What I say will thus have some of the features of autobiography, but I hope it will be plain that this story is not really about me but about the state of the culture in which modern law and literature …

John Henry Wigmore, Richard D. Friedman

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Wigmore, John Henry (1863-1943). Law professor and dean. Wigmore was born and reared in San Francisco. His parents were both immigrants, his mother from England and his father, of English heritage, from Ireland. Harry, as he was known familiarly, was the oldest and most favored of his extraordinarily doting mother's seven children. The family was prosperous - his father had an importing business - and Harry was educated principally in private schools. He then attended Harvard College, prompting the mother to move the family to Massachusetts to be close to him. After graduating in 1883, he spent a brief interlude …

Law, Economics, And Torture, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

This paper addresses three sets of questions, among which it wishes to draw connections: (1) Why has there been so little resistance to the recent massive transfer of national wealth to the rich and super-rich? It is the majority who are injured, and they presumably hold the power in a democracy: why have they not exercised it? (2) Why are law schools so dominated by questions of policy, with rather little interest in the intellectual and linguistic activities of the practicing lawyer and judge? Why indeed do judicial opinions themselves seem so often to be written in a dead and …

The Invisible Discourse Of The Law: Reflections On Legal Literacy And General Education, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Almost everyone who is not trained in the law has struggled to understand legal documents, such as contracts and guarantees - not because they read poorly but because they lack legal knowledge and experience with legal language. Readers can experience the same difficulty in other fields such as philosophy, literary theory, or economics; it takes time to gain the knowledge required to become an expert reader in these areas. However, between the extremes of the trained legal expert and the complete novice is "another possible meaning of legal literacy: the degree of competence in legal discourse that is required for …

Making Sense Of Criminal Law, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

When a student comes to law school, he leaves behind a world he knows and understands and turns to another world, that of the law, which at the beginning he cannot comprehend. He is immersed in a body of literature that is at once assertive and confusing; he attends a series of classes in which his teacher seems to make the unsettling assumption that he already knows what he came to learn. One question he will naturally ask himself of all this - his experience of the law - is whether it makes any sense to him. And for a …

The First Year Courses: What's There And What's Not, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

At the great majority of American law schools, students begin with a set of required courses that bear the titles of the next six chapters: Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, Torts, and Constitutional Law. The six are likely to be taught in ways that resemble each other on the surface. Each will have a "casebook" slightly heavier than a Chicago phone book. Each casebook will devote more pages to the decisions of courts of appeals than any other form of material, and assignments will come almost entirely from the casebook. In class, the professors will have an arched eyebrow for …

The University And The Aims Of Professional Education, Terrance Sandalow

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The graduate schools of elite American universities, Daniel Bell wrote not many years ago (though before "elite" had become a term of opprobrium), stand at the center of their parent institutions, a position from which they dominate not only American higher education but, increasingly, the intellectual life of the nation. Michigan was, of course, high on Bell's list of elite universities, and it is, therefore, fitting that we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of its graduate school as an occasion worthy of celebration.

The First Year Courses: What's There And What's Not, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

At the great majority of American law schools, students begin with a set of required courses that bear the titles of our next six chapters: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, Torts, and Constitutional Law. The six are likely to be taught in ways that resemble each other on the surface. Each will have a "casebook" slightly heavier than a Sears catalog. Each casebook will devote more pages to the decisions of courts of appeals. than any other form of material, and your assignments will come almost entirely from the casebook. In class, the professors will have an arched eyebrow …

Minority Preferences In Law School Admissions, Terrance Sandalow

Book Chapters

In addressing the subject of "reverse discrimination," I want to caution at the outset against permitting the use of the word "discrimination" to prejudice consideration of the subject. "Discrimination" has, in recent years, become a bad word. It tends to be used as a shorthand for "unjustifiably unequal treatment." In its original and still proper meaning, however, the word is quite neutral. Discrimination merely means differentiation. It comes from a Latin word that means "to distinguish." Accordingly, when we discriminate-i.e., when we differentiate or distinguish-among people, the propriety of our action depends upon the reasons that we have acted as …

The First-Year Courses: What's There And What's Not, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

For many of you, law school will be a full-time occupation for three school years; for others, a second job squeezed in at night over four or five years. Whatever your route to a degree, whatever sort of law school you attend, the beginnings of law school are likely to be much the same. You will face initially a set of required courses that will probably bear the same titles as the titles of our next six chapters: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, Torts and Constitutional Law. The six are likely to be taught in ways that resemble each …

Estate And Gift Taxation, Douglas A. Kahn

Book Chapters

ANSWERING TAX EXAMINATION QUESTIONS

The key to writing a successful answer to a tax question (as with any law exam) is to locate the relevant issues and to analyze them by interrelating applicable legal principles with the basic facts of the question. This determination of relevant issues must be tied to the facts presented in the question.

The first step in question analysis is to read the facts closely and note each element in the facts that is relevant to issues you have studied in the subject being tested since it is likely that the examiner intended that those issues …