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Full-Text Articles in Law

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho Apr 2017

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …


Spring 2017 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma Wood Apr 2017

Spring 2017 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma Wood

Law Library Newsletter

Copy of the Spring 2017 issue of the UMass Law Library Newsletter, The Docket.


Fall 2017 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma M. Wood Jan 2017

Fall 2017 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma M. Wood

Law Library Newsletter

Copy of the Fall 2017 issue of the UMass Law Library Newsletter, The Docket.


Carpenter Privacy Case Vexes Justices, While Tech Giant Microsoft Battles Government In Second U.S. Supreme Court Privacy Case With International Implications, Richard J. Peltz-Steele Jan 2017

Carpenter Privacy Case Vexes Justices, While Tech Giant Microsoft Battles Government In Second U.S. Supreme Court Privacy Case With International Implications, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Fall 2017 saw a major privacy case with international implications reach the U.S. Supreme Court this term, Carpenter v. United States. Now a second such case pits the Government against Big Tech in United States v. Microsoft. Carpenter is a criminal case involving federal seizure of cell phone location data from service providers. Arising under the “reasonable grounds” provision of the Stored Communications Act (SCA), the case accentuates Americans’ lack of constitutional protection for personal data in third-party hands, in contrast with emerging global privacy norms. The second major privacy case headed for Supreme Court decision in 2018 also arises …


Emerging Adults: A New Understanding Of Millennial Law Students, Rebecca C. Flanagan Jan 2017

Emerging Adults: A New Understanding Of Millennial Law Students, Rebecca C. Flanagan

Faculty Publications

The challenges facing emerging adults in law school can be some of the vexing for Academic Success professionals if these students are assumed to have the adult life experiences of prior generations of law students. However, their challenges can be some of the simplest to solve when Academic Success professionals are aware of trends in law school admissions and undergraduate education. Academic Success professionals have the tools to work with doctrinal or substantive professors to provide context to the difficulties students are experiencing with understanding class discussions.


Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It: Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously, Irene Scharf, Vanessa Merton Jan 2017

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It: Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously, Irene Scharf, Vanessa Merton

Faculty Publications

A law school can best achieve excellence and have the most effective academic program when it possesses a clear mission, a plan to achieve that mission, and the capacity and willingness to measure its success or failure. Absent a defined mission and the identification of attendant student and institutional outcomes, a law school lacks focus and its curriculum becomes a collection of discrete activities without coherence.