Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Law

Spoiler Alert: When The Supreme Court Ruins Your Brief Problem Mid-Semester, Margaret Hannon Sep 2019

Spoiler Alert: When The Supreme Court Ruins Your Brief Problem Mid-Semester, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Partway through the winter 2019 semester,1 the Supreme Court ruined my favorite summary judgment brief problem while my students were working on it. I had decided to use the problem despite the Court granting cert and knowing it was just a matter of time before the Court issued its decision. In this Article, I share some of the lessons that I learned about the risks involved in using a brief problem based on a pending Supreme Court case. I conclude that, while I have not typically set out to base a problem on a pending Supreme Court case, doing so …


Corresponding Ideas In Corresponding Forms, Patrick Barry Aug 2019

Corresponding Ideas In Corresponding Forms, Patrick Barry

Articles

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that content always comes before structure. You don’t need to figure out all your ideas before you decide how to organize them. Much value can come from going in the opposite direction: first figure out how you are going to organize your ideas—their appropriate structure—and then determine the appropriate content. I often offer law students the following suggestion: “Once you find the right structure, perhaps it will be easier to find the right content.”


Uselessly Accurate, Patrick Barry May 2019

Uselessly Accurate, Patrick Barry

Articles

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis in details," Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote in his 1925 collection Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses. The problem hasn't gone away, as any reader of legal briefs, contracts, and memos can attest. This essay offers a few ways to help.


Good Sentences, Patrick Barry Feb 2019

Good Sentences, Patrick Barry

Articles

To write good sentences, you need to read good sentences. Skilled writers and editors know this, so they seek out good sentences wherever they can find them—the short stories of Alice Munro, the political essays of William F. Buckley, even well-crafted cartoons, speeches, and advertisements. They read not just with voracity but also with an eye toward larceny, always on the lookout for moves that they can learn and repurpose.


Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 1), Edward R. Becker Jan 2019

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 1), Edward R. Becker

Articles

Every fall, I work with my first year law students to begin developing their legal writing skills. They work hard learning how to analyze cases objectively, predict how a court might resolve a dispute, and convey their assessments to an experienced attorney. Their improvement from September to December is noticeable. They have only one semester of law school behind them and still have much to learn, but they’re on their way…In the second semester, we begin focusing on advocacy. The first assignment asks students to draft a pretrial brief. When I review the drafts, I’m struck by how many problems …


Review Of Draft No. 4, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky Jan 2019

Review Of Draft No. 4, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

Reviews

"Draft No. 4" is an essay collection by John McPhee about his long career as a journalist for The New Yorker. This book review uses the essay collection as a jumping-off point to discuss the similarities and differences between legal writing and long-form journalism, and what legal writers can learn about the writing process from journalists like McPhee.


Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown Jan 2019

Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Inspired by “‘A Day in My Law Library Life,’ Circa 1997,” this compilation collects descriptions of a day in the lives of law librarians in 2018. The descriptions provide a current snapshot and historical record of the law library profession, with similarities to, and differences from, the profession of 1997.


Research Resources For Michigan Criminal Law, Kate E. Britt Jan 2019

Research Resources For Michigan Criminal Law, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

Few areas of the law are as consequential to the personal lives of those involved as criminal law. The law can, and does, change quickly, and attorneys need to stay abreast of the latest developments to effectively represent their clients. Thankfully, modern government bodies publish current primary law (and many useful secondary sources) online. The sites outlined below will take users to reliable sources of Michigan criminal law and procedure.


Social Freedom, Democracy And The Political: Three Reflections On Axel Honneth's Idea Of Socialism, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, James T. Sparrow Jan 2019

Social Freedom, Democracy And The Political: Three Reflections On Axel Honneth's Idea Of Socialism, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, James T. Sparrow

Articles

Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political limits of Honneth’s social reconstruction.


How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown Jan 2019

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.


Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell Jan 2019

Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell

Reviews

No abstract provided.


The Most Revealing Word In The United States Report, Richard Primus Jan 2019

The Most Revealing Word In The United States Report, Richard Primus

Articles

The most prominent issue in NFIB v. Sebelius was whether Congress’s regulatory power under the Commerce Clause stops at a point marked by a distinction between “activity” and “inactivity.” According to the law’s challengers, prior decisions about the scope of the commerce power already reflected the importance of the distinction between action and inaction. In all of the previous cases in which exercises of the commerce power had been sustained, the challengers argued, that power had been used to regulate activity. Never had Congress tried to regulate mere inactivity. In NFIB, four Justices rejected that contention, writing that such …