Law Commons^™

The Business Of Securities Class Action Lawyering, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, Adam C. Pritchard

Law & Economics Working Papers

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on their behalf. As a result, plaintiffs’ lawyers control these cases, deciding which cases to file and how to litigate them. Recognizing the agency costs inherent in this model, the legal system relies on lead plaintiffs and judges to monitor these lawyers and protect the best interests of absent class members. Yet …

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

Articles

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and 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. Acknowledgments 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 factors. The landscape …

Résumé Review: Breadth And Depth, Patrick Barry

Articles

Nobody is born knowing how to craft an effective résumé. But because the document can play a major role in a young lawyer’s career, I often talk with law students and new attorneys about how they might revise the versions they send out to potential employers. I usually frame my advice by telling them about a concept that can give their resumes a helpful organizing structure: being “T-shaped.”

What's In A Number? Basic Statistical Literacy For Lawyers, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

There is a running joke within the legal profession that lawyers choose to go to law school because they are bad at math. Facially, this proposition makes sense. The bread and butter of the legal profession is written and oral advocacy, not numbers and arithmetic.

But the legal profession has never existed outside of the realm of numbers. And in today’s world of big data where judges’ decisions and opposing counsel’s actions can be quantified and packaged into orderly statistics, basic statistical literacy is a critical part of legal research and practice.

Dethroning Langdell, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I come not to bury the case method. I come merely to dethrone it. While the case method’s monopolistic hold on the law school classroom has loosened somewhat in recent years, it is still the dominant approach to pedagogy in many law school classrooms—and especially in the first-year law student experience. That is also true of the case method’s traditional pedagogical partners, the Socratic method and the cold call: their dominance has declined somewhat, even while they still have remarkable staying power.

This Essay identifies one fault with our continued acquiescence to these pedagogical mainstays of law school classrooms: it …

How Not To Lie: A Don't-Do-It-Yourself Guide For Litigators, Leonard Niehoff

Articles

Over the past few years, a number of high-profile attorneys have been sanctioned or suspended from the practice of law because they lied. The instance that probably received the greatest media attention came in June of 2021, when the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York ordered the immediate suspension of Rudy Giuliani’s license because he had made demonstrably false statements to the courts, lawmakers, and the public at large concerning the 2020 presidential election. In a 33- page opinion, the court considered the arguments Giuliani raised in his defense but concluded that his pants …

Wandering Into Psychology And Law, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Some people have a passion for a single topic that motivates and engages them for life. I’m not one of them. I can get interested in almost anything, and my career looks more like a random walk through a candy store than a single-minded pursuit of a goal. I am both a theorist and researcher in the field of emotion and a contributor to the application of psychology to legal issues. In this piece I will focus on my work in psychology and law. A review of my research on emotion can be found in Ellsworth and Scherer (2003).

Happily Ever After, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

I have been lucky in my upbringing and education, and especially in having advisors who let me do what I wanted to even when they didn’t think it was a good idea. This allowed me to have a deeply rewarding career devoted to two entirely different topics – basic theory and research on emotion, and applied theory and research in psychology and law. My career spanned the period from when women were considered unsuitable for scientific or academic work through the rise of feminism, so although I faced obstacles, the culture was changing quickly enough that my unusual choices soon …

How To Improve Legal Representation Of Children In America's Child Welfare System, Donald Duquette

Law & Economics Working Papers

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 article provides the final recommendations of this project. These recommendations have not yet been published in the academic literature. This article first summarizes the research findings of the QIC-ChildRep project. Then it sets out QIC-ChildRep recommendations for: 1) Training and supervision of lawyers; 2) State statutes and rules governing lawyers for children; 3) State organizational structure to support child representation; 4) Strategies for recruiting lawyers in this specialty; 5) Caseload size; …

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 …

Professionalism In Tribal Jurisdictions, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

American Indian law is an important area of law. There are 12 federally recognized Indian tribes in the state of Michigan.1 Indian tribes throughout the United States do business in Michigan. Indian tribal governments and corporations employ hundreds of thousands of non-Indians and received billions in federal pandemic relief. Indian gaming generated nearly $40 billion in revenues nationally last year. Still, many lawyers ignore the field or claim ignorance about the basic precepts of federal Indian law.

This article will canvass several themes of professionalism in tribal practice, drawing from this author’s tribal law experience over the last few decades. …

Libraries & Legal Research: Resources For Technological Competency, Virginia Neisler

Law Librarian Scholarship

At the time this article was written, Michigan was one of 39 states that included understanding relevant technologies as a part of the duty of attorney competence. In 2019, the Michigan Supreme Court formally adopted a new comment to MRPC 1.1. With respect to competence as covered under this rule, their comment made explicit that all Michigan attorneys should “engage in continuing study and education, including the knowledge and skills regarding existing and developing technology that are reasonably necessary to provide competent representation for the client in a particular matter” [emphasis added].

In February 2020, the State Bar of Michigan …

The Stoic Litigator, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

A variety of events over the past several years have renewed my conversations with some reliable old friends. And I mean very old. I refer here to the Stoic philosophers, most of whom did their thinking and writing around the turn of the Common Era.

The Stoics took their name from the central square of Athens, the Stoa Poikile, where Zeno is generally credited with founding the school in the early part of the third century BCE. Various philosophers over the next five centuries identified themselves as Stoics, so the label takes in lots of personalities and lots of territory. …

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?

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.

Clerking For Roger J. Traynor, Roland E. Brandel, James E. Krier

Book Chapters

Justice Roger J. Traynor was born in Utah in 19001 the son of a miner and drayman. He left after high school to undertake undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually earning (simultaneously) a Ph.D. in political science and a law degree from Boalt Hall, the university's law school. He practiced law for just a few months, then returned to the university to teach in its political science department. A year later, in 19301 he joined the law faculty, where he worked until his appointment to the California Supreme Court in 1940. He became chief justice …

Are We There Yet? Discovery For The New Litigator, Erin Rhinehart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

If the road is life, then discovery is litigation. It is how we reach our destination. Unfortunately, discovery is like getting there with someone in the backseat.

Anyone who has ever traveled with passengers, especially children, knows how it plays out. In the beginning, everybody is excited. Everyone gleefully piles into the car, eager to launch. No one has any trouble amusing themselves. A couple hours in, a bathroom break and gas station snack later, it hits. The adrenaline wears off and the tedium kicks in. And then you hear the dreaded cry coming from the rear: Are we there …

Thoughts On The Retirement Of Jim Stewart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

At the end of April 2021, Jim Stewart - my friend and colleague of almost 40 years - retired from the practice of law. He will now be spending his time trying to win rounds of golf instead of cases and trying to win arguments with his three daughters instead of opposing counsel. I know Jim will enjoy retirement, but I'm skeptical that his win-loss record is about to improve.

Civil Rights, Access To Counsel, And Injunctive Class Actions In The United States, Maureen Carroll

Book Chapters

According to a familiar story about class actions in the United States, aggregation promotes access to counsel by increasing the amount of money from which counsel fees can be taken. Courts usually award class counsel a percentage of the monetary recovery obtained on behalf of the class, and class treatment can turn a $30 case into a $3 million case. But what about class actions that do not involve monetary relief at all? Some civil rights plaintiffs seek to stop a violation, rather than to obtain compensation for past harm, and therefore choose to pursue only an injunction or declaratory …

On Sexual Harassment In The Judiciary, Leah Litman, Deeva Shah

Articles

This Essay examines the legal profession’s role in sexual harassment, particularly in the federal courts. It argues that individuals in the profession have both an individual and collective responsibility for the professional norms that have allowed harassment to happen with little recourse for the people subject to the harassment. It suggests that the legal profession should engage in a sustained, public reflection about how our words, actions, attitudes, and institutional arrangements allow harassment to happen, and about the many different ways that we can prevent and address harassment.

Nicholas C. Howson's Tribute To Professor William P. Alford, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman

Articles

As part of the symposium on Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson’s Democracy and Dysfunction, this Article documents another source of the dysfunction that the authors observe—elite lawyers’ unwillingness to break ranks with other elite lawyers who participate in the destruction of various norms that are integral to a well-functioning democracy. These network effects eliminate the possibility of “soft” sanctions on norm violators such as withholding future professional advancement. Thus, rather than enforcing norms and deterring norm violations, the networks serve to insulate norm violators from any meaningful accountability.

Fee-Shifting Statutes And Compensation For Risk, Maureen S. Carroll

Articles

A law firm that enters into a contingency arrangement provides the client with more than just its attorneys' labor. It also provides a form of financing, because the firm will be paid (if at all) only after the litigation ends; and insurance, because if the litigation results in a low recovery (or no recovery at all), the firm will absorb the direct and indirect costs of the litigation. Courts and markets routinely pay for these types of risk-bearing services through a range of mechanisms, including state fee shifting statutes, contingent percentage fees, common-fund awards, alternative fee arrangements, and third-party litigation …

Using Transactional Practice Competitions To Introduce Students To Key Deal-Making Skills, Ted Becker, Eric Zacks

Articles

Law school moot court competitions are everywhere. That is a bit of an exaggeration, to be sure, but not by much. At last count, students with an interest in litigation had more than 60 interschool appellate advocacy competitions to choose from, ranging in topics from admiralty to space law to veterans law. Toss in trial advocacy competitions, and the number of opportunities to hone litigation skills increases significantly. And seemingly every law school has its own intraschool litigation competitions, ranging from part of a 1L legal writing program to school-wide appellate advocacy competitions whose final rounds attract prominent judges or …

What Litigators Can Learn From B Movies, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

We litigators take our guidance when and where we can find it. Sometimes we stumble across it very late at night, on television. Weary, intellectually spent, and pining for entertainment that makes no demands on us, in "the wee small hours of the morning" we find ourselves watching a so-called B movie - a film that had a low production budget or that manages to be bad despite an ample one. And, lo, enlightenment ensues through this unlikeliest of messengers. Submitted for your consideration are some gems from half a dozen movies that most sensible people won't admit watching but …

The Increasing Reliance On Educational Loans By University Of Michigan Law School Graduates, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

Among graduates of the University of Michigan Law School in the classes of 1970 through 1979, about half borrowed to pay for their college or legal education. By the early 1980s the portion who borrowed had risen to about 80 percent and has remained at that level through the classes of early twenty-first century. Even greater growth has occurred in the average debt of those who incurred debt. In actual dollars, average debts among those with debt have increased twenty-fold from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Even in CPI-adjusted dollars, average debts have tripled. By the classes of 2000-2001, …

Retirement, Partial Retirement, And Working Into Old Age: Michigan Law School Graduates 45 Years Out Of Law School, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

In 1966, the University of Michigan Law School began an annual survey of selected classes of its graduates. For the first few decades of the survey, only the graduating classes five and fifeen years out of law school were included in the survey. Beginning in 1997, graduates 25, 35, and 45 years out of law school were added. This memorandum focuses primarily on surveys conducted between 1997 and 2006 of the living graduates of the classes of 1952 through 1961, who had by then been out of law school for 45 years. After 45 years, the great majority were 69 …

The Effects Of Educational Debts On Career Choices Of Graduates Of The University Of Michigan Law School, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

In 1966, the University of Michigan Law School began an annual survey of selected classes of its graduates. Beginning in the early 1980s, annual surveys of those five and fifteen years after law school included questions about educational debts incurred during college and law school as well as about career plans at the beginning and end of law school and actual job held in the years since law school. This paper, written in 2009, examines the possible effects of debts on career decisions and job choices made before, during and after law school by the graduating classes of 1976 through …

Finding A Mentor In The Practice Of Law: An Empirical Inquiry, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

For many years the University of Michigan Law School has surveyed its graduates after they have been out of law school five, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five and forty-five years. This paper about finding mentors focuses on Michigan Law School alumni surveyed five years after graduation during the sixteen year period between 1985 and 2000 and particularly on those who have ever worked in a private law firm, a setting in which it is commonly believed that having a mentor is critical for a young lawyer’s success.

Our central findings are these: Among alumni who had worked in a law firm within …

Women And Men Graduates Of The University Of Michigan Law School: Career Patterns And Adjustments For Children, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

The University of Michigan Law School conducted mail surveys of classes of its alumni each year from 1966 and 2006. This memorandum builds upon the mail surveys conducted through 2006 and in particular survey questions asked about the sex of the respondent, the settings in which they have worked since law school, the hours they work and their earnings in their current settings, whether they have children and the various adjustments they have made in order to care for children, such as working part-time or leaving the work force altogether for periods of time. The memorandum has two principal focuses: …