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Full-Text Articles in Law
Judge Kozinski Objects, Beth H. Wilensky
Judge Kozinski Objects, Beth H. Wilensky
Articles
Sitting judges don’t get to practice law. So although they often opine on the dos and don’ts of effective advocacy, we rarely get to see them put their advice into practice. But a few years ago, a class-action lawsuit provided the rare opportunity to witness a federal judge acting as an advocate before another federal judge—if not in the role of attorney, then certainly in as close to that role as we are likely to see. Given the chance to employ his own advice about effective advocacy, would the judge—Alex Kozinski—practice what he preaches? Would his years of experience on …
The Words Under The Words, Patrick Barry
The Words Under The Words, Patrick Barry
Articles
The words lawyers choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this change “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%” — even though a survival rate of 90% is exactly the same as a mortality rate of 10%. They’ve also found that having to pay a “surcharge” for using a credit card rankles people (especially people in the credit card lobby) more than if they were simply told …
Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker
Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker
Articles
Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.
What Is "Good Legal Writing" And Why Does It Matter?, Mark Osbeck
What Is "Good Legal Writing" And Why Does It Matter?, Mark Osbeck
Articles
Law schools face increasing pressure to improve instruction in practice-oriented skills. One of the most important of these skills is legal writing. The existing literature on legal writing contains various rules and suggestions as to how legal writers can improve their writing skills. Yet it lacks an adequate theoretical account of the fundamental nature of good legal writing. As a result, legal writers are left without a solid conceptual framework to ground the individual rules and suggestions. This Article attempts to fill the theoretical void in the literature by offering a systematic analysis of what it is for a legal …
Make Your Life Easier: Free Online Productivity Tools And Resources, Kincaid C. Brown
Make Your Life Easier: Free Online Productivity Tools And Resources, Kincaid C. Brown
Law Librarian Scholarship
CiteGenie works primarily for caselaw and Internet resource research but is experimenting with the ability to add citations for statutes and regulations. CiteGenie provides a number of formatting options and allows you to choose citation rules for a particular state, use parallel citations, remove star-pagination marks from quoted texts, and personalize abbreviations. This tool is easy to use; when researching in Firefox, select CiteGenie from the right-click menu and a pop-up displays the copied text and citation to be pasted.
Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith
Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith
Michigan Law Review
The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness" (p. 36), and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment" (p. 2). Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulat[e] a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue" (p. 2), one that …
Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich
Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich
Michigan Law Review
In Part I, I expand on the distinction between the Horatian and the Menippean forms of satire and then suggest that a similarly bold division can be used to map satirical legal studies. In support of that argument, I use the example of the earliest surviving satirical legal poem within the Western tradition. My analysis of this exemplary satirical legal artifact delineates four principal modes of legal satire that will organize the ensuing discussion of more contemporary examples of the genre. In Part II, I will address the currently popular and yet somewhat novel mode of ad hominem or nominate …
Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Michigan Law Review
I share Judge Edwards' concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my …
Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson
Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson
Michigan Law Review
I can summarize my response as follows: Although Judge Edwards' article certainly seems to be leveling a heartfelt indictment, it lacks a sufficiently precise bill of particulars to know exactly whom he has accused of doing what. Nor does one know exactly what penalty Judge Edwards would exact from the miscreants. Unless he supplies such a bill, his indictment should be dismissed, though, presumably, without prejudice to its reinstatement should he wish to do the hard work of supplying evidence for the charges he set out.
Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon
Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon
Michigan Law Review
The Judge seems to be arguing that both teachers and firm lawyers have been seduced from their real vocation by the fatal attraction of neighboring cultures: the practitioners by the commercial culture of their business clients, the academics by the disciplinary paradigms and prestige of theory in the rest of the university. The "deserted middle ground" is the ground of professional practice - practical, yet also public-minded. Perhaps without straining his thesis too far we could ascribe to Judge Edwards a "republican" view of the legal profession, in which legal scholars, practitioners, judges, legislators, and administrators - despite their separate …
Law Teachers' Writing, James Boyd White
Law Teachers' Writing, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
Judge Edwards divides scholarship into the theoretical and the practical, and, while conceding the place and value of both, argues that there is today too much of the former, too little of the latter. The result, he says, is an increasing and unfortunate divide between the life of law practice and the writing of law teachers. One can understand his complaint readily enough, especially coming as it does from an overworked judge. I myself have had perceptions and feelings somewhat like those that seem to animate Judge Edwards, though I would express them differently: for me the relevant line is …
Translation As A Mode Of Thought, James Boyd White
Translation As A Mode Of Thought, James Boyd White
Articles
I think that Clark Cunningham's article, The Lawyer as Translator, is a wonderful piece of work, full of life and interest and originality. I especially admire: his ability to make vivid to the reader the ways in which languages do truly differ, and differ beyond our efforts to bridge them-as he shows when he imagines an attempt to translate our most common professional terms into Chinese; his recoguition of the kind of force that our languages have over our minds, both as we see the world and as we tell stories about it; his sense that what we think of …
The State Of Legal Writing: Res Ipsa Loquitur, George D. Gopen
The State Of Legal Writing: Res Ipsa Loquitur, George D. Gopen
Michigan Law Review
There is a glory, it seems, in the mystery of a language that can be deciphered only by initiates of the secret society; there is a great sense of power and an even greater actuality of power in controlling a language that in turn controls the most pressing affairs of individuals and communities; and there is a monopolistic safety in being able to manipulate a language which because it was part of the creation of legal problems must be part of their solutions as well. It was true in 1921, and it is still true sixty-six years later. This essay …
Lawyer's Writing, Richard C. Wydick
Lawyer's Writing, Richard C. Wydick
Michigan Law Review
A review of How To Write Plain English: A Book for Lawyers & Consumers by Rudolf Flesch