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Full-Text Articles in Law
Do Robomemos Dream Of Electric Nouns?: A Search For The Soul Of Legal Writing, Ian Gallacher
Do Robomemos Dream Of Electric Nouns?: A Search For The Soul Of Legal Writing, Ian Gallacher
Ian Gallacher
This essay considers the possibility that computers might soon be capable of writing many of the documents lawyers typically write, and considers what qualities of writing are uniquely human and whether those qualities are sufficient to render human written work superior to computer generated work. After noting that despite the claims of rhetoricians and narrative theorists, not all legal writing is persuasive writing, and that it is in the non-persuasive area of prosaic, functional documents that computer generated documents might gain a bridgehead into the legal market, the essay tracks the development of computer-generated written work, particularly in the areas …
"When Numbers Get Serious": A Study Of Plain English Usage In Briefs Filed Before The New York Court Of Appeals, Ian Gallacher
"When Numbers Get Serious": A Study Of Plain English Usage In Briefs Filed Before The New York Court Of Appeals, Ian Gallacher
Ian Gallacher
This article describes the results of a study of briefs filed in the New York Court of Appeals between 1969 and 2008. In particular, portions of these briefs were analyzed using the Flesch Reading Ease test and the Flesh-Kincaid test. The first of these tests claims to determine how "readable" a piece of text might be, and the second expresses its results in terms of the grade level a hypothetical reader should have attained before the given text becomes "readable." Both of these tests are fallible, especially when used to determine the actual "readability" of a piece of text, but …
The Count's Dilemma, Or, Harmony And Dissonance In Legal Language, Ian Gallacher
The Count's Dilemma, Or, Harmony And Dissonance In Legal Language, Ian Gallacher
Ian Gallacher
Lawyers have had a long, but ambivalent, relationship with metaphor. Viewed by some as a mere literary device, a trick of language that "adds little of substance to an argument," metaphor is seen by others as an essential component of legal language, a rhetorical device inseparable from thought. On one thing, though, all can agree: lawyers only have words to express their thoughts, so they have an obligation to use words, whether used metaphorically or not, as exactly as possible. This article offers a critique of the way lawyers meet this obligation when they use metaphors based in musical language. …
Thinking Like Non-Lawyers: Why Empathy Is A Core Lawyering Skill And Why Legal Education Should Change To Reflect Its Importance, Ian Gallacher
Thinking Like Non-Lawyers: Why Empathy Is A Core Lawyering Skill And Why Legal Education Should Change To Reflect Its Importance, Ian Gallacher
Ian Gallacher
This article is an exploration of some of the issues raised by the recent Carnegie Report on legal education, and contains a recommendation that law schools change the way they teach especially first year law students in order to make them more empathetically aware of the circumstances by which the court opinions they study arose and the effects those opinions will have on others. This recommendation is made not just because it will make students better people, but also because it will make them better lawyers; the article analyses in depth the dangers inherent in an overemphasis on the “logical” …
Conducting The Constitution: Justice Scalia, Textualism, And The Eroica Symphony, Ian Gallacher
Conducting The Constitution: Justice Scalia, Textualism, And The Eroica Symphony, Ian Gallacher
Ian Gallacher
This article summarizes various modes of Constitutional and musical interpretation and imagines how Justice Antonin Scalia might interpret Beethoven's Eroica symphony using the Constitutional interpretative philosophy he espouses.