Law Commons^™

By Command Of Her Majesty: An Introduction To The Command Papers Of The United Kingdom, Stephen E. Young

Scholarly Articles

Mr Young explores the history, format, and arrangement of the Command Papers. He provides a brief description of their availability in hard copy and electronic formats, and also describes the availability and use of various indexing tools for this series of parliamentary papers.

Substantive Editing Versus Technical Editing: How Law Review Editors Do Their Job, Anne Enquist

Faculty Articles

Law review editors often have a hard time adjusting to their new role of evaluating and critiquing the work of professors and established legal scholars, resulting in entire editorial boards missing fundamental problems in a particular article. The author provides a solution to this problem by recommending the adoption of two separate phases of editing - a substantive editing phase, which addresses what the article actually communicates, and a technical editing phase, which addresses the form the author uses to communicate. As examples for any law review to follow, the author provides two substantive edits of two different author submissions …

Alwd Citation Manual: A Professional System Of Citation, Terrill Pollman, Leah A. Kane

Scholarly Works

The Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) has written a new citation manual that is easy to teach from and easy to use.

Although the ALWD Manual provides a very different teaching and learning experience, practitioners should experience few difficulties adjusting to the new manual.

Riddikulus!: Tenure-Track Legal Writing Faculty And The Boggart In The Wardrobe, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley compares myths to boggarts in this examination of the reasons schools cite when explaining their lack of tenure-track positions for legal writing faculty. These boggarts are the living myths that pop out and whisper in faculty ears whenever someone suggests that law schools should create tenure-track - or even permanent - faculty positions in legal writing. Although some faculties have defeated these boggarts, they are still out there, popping out not from under the bed or from behind the closet door, but at lunch in the faculty lounge, after the committee meeting, and during the conversation in the …

Remarks, Golden Pen Award, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley, then President of the Legal Writing Institute, joins her colleagues in presenting the inaugural Golden Pen Award to Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the United States Securities Exchange Commission, for his leadership in requiring plain language in financial disclosure documents, in this transcript of the presentation of the award at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

The Influence Of Amicus Curiae Briefs On The Supreme Court, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The last century has seen little change in the conduct of litigation before the United States Supreme Court. The Court's familiar procedures – the October Term, the opening-answering-reply brief format for the parties, oral argument before a nine-member Court – remain essentially as before. The few changes that have occurred, such as shortening the time for oral argument, have not been dramatic.

The Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of amicus curiae activity in the Supreme Court over the last fifty years, tracking the increase in amicus filings and in the Court's citation and quotation of …

The Nature And Function Of Criminal Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The practice of teaching and writing in the field of criminal law has changed dramatically in the last half-century. In the United States and England, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries, we have witnessed a turn toward theoretical inquires of a greater depth and variety than had existed previously in the history of Anglo-American law. The subjects of this new literature include the nature and rationale of punishment; the theory of justification and of excuse, that is, of wrongdoing and responsibility; the relevance of consequences to the gravity of offenses (the problem of moral luck); and the …

Beyond Communication: Writing As A Means Of Learning, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

In this article, Professor Oates examines the belief that writing facilitates learning from several perspectives. Part I describes the writing-to-learn movement, beginning with James N. Britton's and Janet Emig's assertions that writing is a unique method of learning and ending with John M. Ackerman's claim that writing is no better and, is sometimes worse, than other modes of learning. Building on the evidence described in Part I, Part II discusses writing to learn in light of four theories: behaviorism, Linda S. Flower and John Hayes's models of the composing process, Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia's models of knowledge telling and …

Climb High: High Altitude Mountaineering Lessons For Librarians, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

No abstract provided.

Symposium: Advances In Biomaterials And Devices, And Their Financing, Michael S. Baram, Ronald A. Cass, Steven Bauer, Joyce Wong, Martin Yarmush, Joshua Tolkoff, Rufus King

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Professor Michael Baram and I direct the Center for Law and Technology here at the law school. Today's meeting is the third annual Technology Law Symposium to be held here, sponsored by the high technology law firm of Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, LLP and the Center for Law and Technology.

Our meeting today is focused on an exciting area of research and product development. This area involves the use of conventional as well as new genetically engineered biomaterials in new medical device configurations for implantation and with the purpose of restoring bodily functions, regenerating tissue, bone, cartilage, …

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

Colorado Association Of Law Libraries, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

No abstract provided.

Linking Globally, Coping Locally: Cataloging Internet Resources At The University Of Colorado Law Library, Karen Selden

Publications

Web-based online public access catalogs (OPACs) enable catalogers to provide hotlinks to Internet-based resources of interest to their patrons. However, this capability is not without its challenges. Ms. Selden explores the local policy considerations associated with cataloging Internet resources and describes the policy-making process and some Internet cataloging policies used at the University of Colorado Law Library.

A Reflective Rhetorical Model: The Legal Writing Teacher As Reader And Writer, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Like most writing teachers, the legal writing teacher believes that his reading and response to student work is the most important thing he does, an importance that is underscored by the amount of time it takes. Yet, despite its importance and the hours it consumes, the rhetoric of teacher reading and writing remains relatively unexplored. This article proposes that we begin to apply what we have learned about student reading and writing to our own reading and writing. Our process of reading and responding to student work should be as reflective and rhetorical as the reading and writing process that …

Avoiding Common Problems In Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory And Experience, Edward R. Becker, Rachel Croskery-Roberts

Articles

A majority of American law schools rely on teaching assistants to help administer first-year legal writing, research, and analysis (LWRA) courses. Specifically, surveys jointly conducted by the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) consistently detail the extensive use many LWRA professors make of teaching assistants. Likewise, Julie Cheslik recognized in her article about her 1994 survey on the use of TAs in the typical LWRA course that "[o]ne of the most prevalent uses of peer teachers in the law school setting is the employment of upper-level law students as teaching assistants in the first-year …

Clinical Legal Education: Energy And Transformation, David J. Herring

Articles

The clinical movement has had a dramatic impact on the nation's law schools. Administrators and faculty members cannot successfully ignore it or wish it away. Instead, they must address it and seek ways to harness its energy. My perspective on this subject stems from my entry into academia as a clinician. I was a faculty member in the University of Michigan's Child Advocacy Law Clinic for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with the charge to create and implement an in-house clinic program. Over the past ten years, I have assisted in the …

Joe Grano: The 'Kid From South Philly' Who Educated Us All (In Tribute To Joseph D. Grano), Yale Kamisar

Articles

No serious student of police interrogation and confessions can write on the subject without building on Professor Joseph D. Grano's work or explaining why he or she disagrees with him (and doing so with considerable care). Nor is that all.

Law School On The Liffey: My Experiences At Trinity College, Dublin, Janet Sinder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Critical Approaches To Property Institutions, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White

Articles

Assume a bright hypothetical social scientist - call her Phoebe - who is completely ignorant of legal research as it is practiced in today's law schools. Phoebe might speculate about legal research as follows. First, she would note that the law schools are joined with and are the exclusive source of the practitioners of a profession. Second, she would note that commercial and legal actors rub up against and are influenced by the law in countless ways every day. Third, she might remark that this interaction occurs practically on the doorsteps of our law schools. Unlike anthropologists, who may have …

Bye-Bye Bluebook?, Pamela Lysaght, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

In March 2000, Aspen Law & Business published a new citation manual, the ALWD Citation Manual-A Professional System of Citation.' Developed mostly as a "restatement of citation," the ALWD Citation Manual not only provides the legal academy with a text that simplifies teaching legal citation, but also provides judges and lawyers with a helpful desktop reference book. This article explains why a new citation manual was created and highlights some of its significant features?