Law Commons^™

Guest Blog On Skills: Professor Jan Levine's Legislative Drafting Course At Duquesne, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

For more than two decades, at three law schools, I have been teaching an advanced legal writing course that builds upon the foundation created in the first-year writing courses and introduces students to new drafting skills, focusing on statutes and statutory drafting. The final project in the course requires students to solve a personally-identified legal or quasi-legal problem by drafting a report and a statute, ordinance, regulation, procedural rule, or a similar solution.

Legal Origin Theory [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

In this volume, Simon Deakin, Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge and Katharina Pistor, the Michael I Sovem Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, considered the merits of Legal Origin Theory (LOT) in three fields of inquiry: the study of comparative law, the analysis of the relation between law and markets, and the understanding of the role of legal systems in social ordering. In their succinct and provocative introduction, Deakin and Pistor discuss the evolution of this legal theory without shying away from its controversial nature.

Technology, Alienation, And The Future Of Litigation-Based Social Change, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

This article addresses the apparent inconsistency of the impact technology has on the "rights vocabulary." It theorizes how, in certain circumstances, it erodes this progressive vocabulary by making it and the subsequent judicial litigation superfluous.

The Many Texts Of The Law, Michael Davis, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

This paper contends that even as jurists invoke the official canonic version of the legal text, it is in danger of being replaced for the jurist, as well as for the lay person, if it has not been substituted already, by some apocryphal, inauthentic or casual text. We argue that in addition to the approximate nature of legal knowledge, the overuse of overedited and perverted casebooks, as well as the distribution of legal information among imperfect sources – some official but partial, others inauthentic but highly accessible, and a few reliable but highly unaffordable commercial sources – are largely responsible …

Limiting Criminal Law’S “In For A Penny, In For A Pound” Doctrine, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court took two cases this Term involving doctrines of criminal law typically dealt with by state courts, and in each of them, it limited criminal liability for harms not attributable to a defendant’s culpability.

Although the Court interprets federal criminal statutes with some frequency, it rarely considers provisions of statutes that would provide persuasive authority for the interpretation of state criminal codes—at least not the most used provisions of state criminal codes. Unlike state criminal laws, federal criminal laws have jurisdictional requirements and generally have more complex components. It is typically these unique aspects of federal criminal laws …