Law Commons^™

Test Your Legal Literacy By Answering One Question, John M. Bosco

John M Bosco

No abstract provided.

India And Asean : An Enduring Partnership, Brajesh Rajak

Brajesh rajak

This paper analyses the enduring partnership between India and ASEAN and the reasons for the proximity between the two. It details why India has adopted a “Look-East” policy, what the policy is, its necessity and whether it is a success or failure. The article also scrutinises the steps taken by the Indian government to improve relations with ASEAN countries, the obstructions in the way and finally looks at the ASEAN–India free trade agreement.

A Tale Of Election Day 2008: Teaching Storytelling Through Repeated Experiences, Serge A. Martinez, Stefan H. Krieger

Stefan H Krieger

The article was inspired by a one-day project November 4, 2008, when we supervised a number of clinic students representing voters who had been denied the right to vote. As they represented client after client, we noticed significant improvement in their storytelling skills over a very short period, despite having little training in storytelling theory or techniques. Using our Election Day project as a starting point, the article questions the dominant pedagogical model for teaching storytelling, which focuses primarily on teaching storytelling and narrative theory. We propose a new method, based on cognitive science findings about experiential learning, that emphasizes …

Refashioning Legal Pedagogy After The Carnegie Report: Something Borrowed, Something New, Debra M. Schneider

Debra M Schneider

The Carnegie Foundation published in 2007 its ground-breaking book titled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, in which it pointed out significant pedagogical imbalance in legal education. In particular, the Carnegie report said that law schools should infuse their curricula with more practical and ethical training. How a law school ought to accomplish the Carnegie aim is another challenge, one that this paper squarely addresses.

Traditional legal education is sorely imbalanced. A law student receives rigorous training in legal doctrine and analytical skills—he learns to “think like a lawyer”—but is left with little training in practical skills or …

Once Upon A Time In Law: Myth, Metaphor, And Authority, Linda H. Edwards

Linda H. Edwards

We have long accepted the role of narrative in fact statements and jury arguments, but in the inner sanctum of analyzing legal authority? Surely not. Yet cases, statutes, rules, and doctrines have stories too. When we talk about legal authority, using all our best formal logic and its bedfellows of analogy and policy, we are actually swimming in a sea of narrative, oblivious to the water around us. As the old Buddhist saying goes, we don’t know who discovered the ocean, but it probably wasn’t a fish.

This article teases out several familiar archetypes hidden in discussions of cases and …

Beginning Legal Writers In Their Own Words: Why The First Weeks Of Legal Writing Are So Tough And What We Can Do About It, Miriam E. Felsenburg, Laura P. Graham

Miriam E Felsenburg

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2007, the authors undertook a study designed to illuminate the reasons why many first-year legal writing students find the first few weeks of the class so difficult and so frustrating. Their own students’ struggles during early legal writing classes were of deep concern to the authors, primarily because these early classes were devoted to teaching fundamental skills, including legal reasoning and analysis. To isolate the reasons for these struggles, the authors administered a series of three surveys to first-year law students at two diverse law schools, seeking to learn how the students’ attitudes toward and …

Judging By The Numbers: An Empirical Study Of The Power Of Story, Kenneth D. Chestek

Kenneth D. Chestek

The recent debate about whether “empathy” is a desirable trait in Supreme Court Justices begs a more fundamental question: are appellate court judges in fact persuaded by appeals to pathos? This article attempts to answer that question by reporting the results of an empirical study the author conducted that investigates whether narrative reasoning, or “stories,” are persuasive to appellate judges. It is the first rigorous study to ever confront this issue directly. The article first describes how the author wrote four test briefs, two on each side of a hypothetical lawsuit. One brief on each side was written as a …

On-Line Legal Research Workshops, Frederick B. Jonassen

Frederick B. Jonassen

Like riding a bicycle, playing tennis, or driving a car, legal research is a skill, and like any other skill it is learned by doing and not by listening to a lecture, though lectures are indispensable for introducing the skill. The mental processes applied in electronic legal research may differ from those applied to book legal research, but because both electronic and book research are skills, a guided workshop in electronic legal research may be based on similar principles to that underlying a workshop in book legal research with appropriate modifications.

The aspects of the electronic legal workshop proposed here …

"Sending Down" Sabbatical: Lawyering In The Legal Services Trenches Has Benefits For Professor And Practitioner Alike, Suzanne Rabe

Suzanne Rabe

This article proposes that clinical professors, and legal writing professors in particular, consider practicing law -- in real-life, non-clinical settings –- during some significant portion of their sabbaticals from teaching. This proposal would (1) improve the learning experience for students in clinics, writing classes, and skills classes, (2) offer a vital public service to the under-represented, and (3) improve the overall administration of justice. At little cost, this proposal would foster a richer engagement by clinicians and legal writing professors with the world of legal practice. This idea could also infuse increased life and meaning into our law school classes. …

Pornography And Law, Brajesh Rajak

Brajesh rajak

This paper discusses about the requirement of pornography law in the present society. This paper also raises questions like can the majority enforce its view of morality on society. It also analyzes other justification like harm principle and freedom of speech behind pornographic law. I think this paper has content in it which should be expressed to the society in the present circumstances in which everybody is confused about morality of pornography.

Sports In The Courts: The Role Of Sports References In Judicial Opinions, Douglas E. Abrams

Douglas E. Abrams

Sports In the Courts: The Role of Sports References in Judicial Opinions by Douglas E. Abrams Abstract In cases with no claims or defenses concerning sports, the Supreme Court and lower federal and state courts frequently publish opinions that draw analogies to the rules or terminology of sports familiar to broad segments of the American people. Sports analogies can help the court explain factual or legal points because today’s generation, including the lawyers and litigants who comprise the prime audience for written opinions, grew into adulthood amid an unprecedented saturation of professional and amateur sports in the broadcast and print …

"Ph.D. Lite": A New Approach To Teaching Scholarly Legal Writing, Jacqueline Lipton

Jacqueline D Lipton

Most American law schools require the satisfaction of an upper level writing requirement, usually in the form of a seminar paper, or “Note”, for graduation. The problem for many students is that the J.D. is not generally geared towards learning scholarly writing. In recent years, the author has experimented with reformulating a seminar class as a “writing workshop” in order to focus on the scholarly writing process. In so doing, she has drawn from experiences supervising legal research degrees in other countries where research-based LL.M. degrees and Ph.D. degrees in law are the norm. This essay details her approach – …

The Decline And Fall Of The American Judicial Opinion: Back To The Future From The Roberts Court To Learned Hand, Jeffrey A. Van Detta

Jeffrey A. Van Detta

In September 2008, Adam Liptak of the N.Y. Times wrote in an article “American Exception: U.S. Court Now Guiding Fewer Nations”:

Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

This is astonishing to many …

Dubai's New Intellectual Property-Based Economy: Prospects For Development Without Dependency, Amir Khoury

Amir Khoury

The Emirate of Dubai has, as a result of deliberate policy actions, been able to reinvigorate, indeed to reinvent, its Intellectual Property Potential. That is to say Dubai has boosted its ability to be the originator (and creator) of intellectual property subject-matter, rather than merely a consumer thereof. Dubai has achieved the two conditions through which an intellectual property régime becomes a valuable national asset for a country with an initially low Intellectual Property Potential; namely a structured regulatory framework coupled with effective infrastructure-related action. Dubai's undertakings in the intellectual property sphere go to show that even a country that …

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Addressing The Issue Of Websites Which Are "Lost In Space", Patricia A. Broussard

Patricia A Broussard

This article takes a "light-hearted" approach to dealing with vanishing websites that have been used as footnotes in legal scholarship. It pokes a bit of fun at scholarship, but ultimately offers some solutions to the problem of vanishing websites.

How Embedded Knowledge Structures Affect Judicial Decision Making: An Analysis Of Metaphor, Narrative, And Imagination In Child Custody Disputes, Linda L. Berger

Linda L. Berger

We live in a time of radically changing conceptions of family and of the relationships possible between children and parents. Though undergoing “a sea-change,” family law remains tethered to culturally embedded stories and symbols. While so bound, family law will fail to serve individual families and a society whose family structures diverge sharply by education, race, class, and income. This article advances a critical rhetorical analysis of the interaction of metaphor and narrative within the specific context of child custody disputes. Its goal is to begin to examine how these embedded knowledge structures affect judicial decision making generally; more specifically, …