Law Commons^™

Scholarship As Fun, Thomas Schultz

Dalhousie Law Journal

One theme that traverses much of Pierre Schlag’s work is a sense of profound humanity—the idea that thinking and writing about the law can and should be a deeply, genuinely human activity—an activity for which we can, and should, break up many of the barriers that stand between us, between who we really are, and what we think and write. It is an activity for which we should put aside our pretences and insecurities and the attached formalisms and exaggerations behind which we so often hide, and which in the end constrain our humanity so much, as they take on …

The Political Economy Of Laughter And Outrage, Genevieve Renard Painter

Dalhousie Law Journal

A bit uncomfortable. That is how it feels to be among dear friends but labelled professionally as an outsider. I have a law degree, a bar membership, and a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. I am a professor in a women’s studies department at Concordia University. At conference receptions, people respond breathlessly, “But they don’t have a law school at Concordia!?,” as though I am hearing confession in a gas station, or something as heretical. I teach legal history, international law, feminist legal theory, and constitutional law to undergraduates who are not in law school and mostly don’t want …

40 More Writing Hacks For Appellate Attorneys, Brian C. Potts

Faculty Articles

Script for Trailer: “40 More Writing Hacks for Appellate Attorneys”

Fade in on aerial view of Washington, D.C.

Zoom in on Supreme Court Building. Chopper sounds. Enter helicopter fleet flying by.

Cut to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., sitting at his desk, reading. He rubs his forehead. Tired. Anxious. Distraught.

Chief: “What a mess! This brief could have been 10 pages shorter!”

Phone rings. Chief answers on speaker.

Law clerk’s voice through phone: “Chief, turn to Appellee’s brief. You’ve got to see this!”

Chief picks up different brief. Flips it open. Zoom in on face. Eyes widen. Jaw drops. …

Mandatory Anti-Bias Cle: A Serious Problem Deserves A More Meaningful Response, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay addresses the problematic convergence of two recent trends: (1) the expansion of jurisdictions requiring anti-bias training (ABT) as part of mandatory continuing legal education (CLE), and (2) the growing recognition among social scientists that such training, at least as currently practiced, is of limited effectiveness.

Forty-six American states require continuing legal education (CLE), and eleven of these states now require lawyer ABT as one facet of CLE requirements. I have previously criticized the mandatory CLE system because so little evidence supports the conclusion that it results in more competent lawyers. The central question tackled by this essay is …

Reimagining Langdell's Legacy: Puncturing The Equilibrium In Law School Pedagogy, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

For more than 150 years, legal education has largely followed the course charted by Christopher Columbus Langdell when he became dean of Harvard Law School in 1870. Langdell’s innovations included the case method, high-stakes summative assessments, and preferences for faculty members with experience in “learning law” rather than practicing it. His proposals were innovative and responsive to challenges in legal education at the time, but this Article argues that taking Langdell’s approach to reform—including a willingness toimplement radical changes in the face of institutional shortcomings—requires reimagining his methods for the benefit of today’s students. We identify key deficiencies of the …

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T, Patrick Barry

Articles

The Keep/Cut Framework we learned about back in the December 2022 Feedback Loops column is, admittedly, a bit of a blunt feedback instrument. When the only feedback you can give is “Keep” or “Cut,” there’s not a ton of room for nuance or gradation. Your comments are restricted to either endorsing what already exists or pushing for something to be removed. hat’s a pretty limited menu.

So in both this column and in the June 2023 column, we’re going to learn about a feedback framework that creates opportunities for a greater range of opinions and recommendations: “E-D-I-T.”

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry

Articles

In the "Feedback Loops" column back in March, we introduced the "E-D-I-T" framework:

• Find something to Eliminate
• Find something to Decrease
• Find something to Increase
• Find something to Try

This new column will discuss each category more in depth.

Exploring Anti-Racism In The First Year Legal Writing Classroom, Amanda K. Maus Stephen

Presentations

The Legal Writing Institute hosted a series of one-day workshops at various law schools, including at SU, where the theme of the workshops was "Teaching Values in the Legal Writing Classroom." This presentation explores assignments and activities that legal writing professors can use to introduce and reinforce ant-racism as a critical professional value.

Assessing A Cooperative Writing Process In An Undergraduate Legal Writing Course, James A. Croft

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

I teach legal writing to undergraduate students, and I primarily do so by cooperatively writing with them, using instructional time to work through the students’ writing assignments as a class. I arrived at this process organically over several years. When I first started teaching, I was surprised by the disconnect between my expectations regarding student writing and student performance. To attempt to close that gap, I began going through parts of the research and writing process cooperatively with my students in class, and increasing the amount of work that we did together each semester until, in the semester assessed …

Swimming With Broad Strokes: Publishing And Presenting Beyond The Lw Discipline, Robin Boyle Laisure, Stephen Paskey

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In our greater skills community, we share ideas, borrow and tweak theories from other disciplines, and create new approaches. It is understandable how our community may expand pedagogy to the brim of legal writing or explore topics outside of the field. Skills professors are, by nature, a creative collective who teach from the heart and enjoy writing and thinking. Our publishing pursuits can be boundless.

Both Authors of this Article share mutual experiences of dipping our toes in a pond beyond the legal writing continent. Our writing experiences have influenced our teaching, bringing these broader perspectives to our legal …

What Is Scholarly Legal Writing? An Introduction To Different Perspectives (On Us Qualified Immunity Doctrine), Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

How do you write a law article? It turns out there is no one ‘right way’. Legal problems can be analysed from different angles. Law journals are full of diverse perspectives on the law.

This document provides an introduction to the different types of legal scholarship that can be found in law journals. It illustrates using scholarship on the American judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields government officials from legal liability for ‘constitutional torts’. Qualified immunity can be analysed from the perspective of doctrine, policy, comparative law, history, economics, empirics, sociology, and philosophy. One issue; many perspectives.

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?

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

Articles

In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

The Unified Legal Skills Program: How One Law School Adapted To Meet The Needs Of Students Online, And How Those Adaptations May Inform Post-Pandemic Teaching, David Austin, Allison D. Cato, Amy E. Day, Liam Vavasour

Faculty Scholarship

When CWSL was forced to switch to online learning for the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked hard to follow best practices for online learning by attending online conferences and voraciously reading everything we could find to make the learning experience the best we could for our students. CWSL's Legal Skills program earned high praise in student evaluations for adapting so quickly given the difficult circumstances.

During the summer of 2020, we met as a Legal Skills team to discuss how to approach the regular school term. Specifically, we faced a larger-than-anticipated first-year class and contemplated how to remedy the sense of …

Justice Ginsburg, Civil Procedure Professor And Champion Of Judicial Federalism, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Cognitive Power Of Analogies In The Legal Writing Classroom, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

New law students traditionally learn better when they can connect what they are learning to a familiar non-legal experience. Therefore, the use of an analogy, which can be defined as a comparison showing the similarities of two otherwise unlike things to help explain an idea or concept, is an obvious way to facilitate a student’s connection between the new and what is already known. An analogy is a logical step in introducing the complex processes of legal research and analysis by attempting to simplify the alien structure of summarizing that legal research and analysis into a coherent piece of …

Justice Ginsburg, Civil Procedure Professor And Champion Of Judicial Federalism, Rodger D. Citron

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Folly Of The Embedded Full Citation: How The Bluebook And Alwd Manuals Encourage Weak Legal Writing, Ben Bratman

Articles

Unfortunately, the two most prominent citation guides for legal writing, the Bluebook and the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, include provisions allowing legal writers to embed a full citation to legal authority as a grammatical element of a textual sentences. As a result, both beginning and experienced legal writers do not hesitate to burden their sentences with the clutter of full citations. Most dubiously, legal writers far too often begin the topic sentence of a paragraph with the phrase “In [case name],” followed by an embedded citation, thereby wrongly emphasizing the case name instead of the legal principle that the …

Criminal Law Drafting Manual, Jean Mangan

Books

This textbook was created under a Round 19 Mini-Grant. It is hosted on the Open ALG (Affordable Learning Georgia) Projects platform.

Plagiarism Pedagogy: Why Teaching Plagiarism Should Be A Fundamental Part Of Legal Education, Brian L. Frye, Megan E. Boyd

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As a practicing lawyer, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice. Litigators copy forms and arguments from winning briefs rather than bill their clients for reinventing the wheel. Transactional lawyers copy enforceable agreements to ensure their agreements are enforceable too. Partners routinely present documents prepared by associates (and sometimes even paralegals) as their own work. And judges are the most prolific plagiarists of all, copying briefs, opinions, treatises, and legal and nonlegal scholarship, adopting arguments from lawyers and holdings from other judges as their own and claiming authorship of opinions written primarily by their clerks or the parties to the …

No Matter How Loud I Shout: Legal Writing As Gender Sidelining, Leslie Culver

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I argue that viewing legal writing as a mode of gender sidelining uncovers the urgency for law schools to provide unitary tenure for legal writing programs across all law schools. I recognize that many legal writing faculty are employed under ABA Standard 405(c), a seemingly second-best option to traditional tenure tracks. As Professor Kathy Stanchi (UNLV) comments, however, while Standard 405(c) offers some respite from “job insecurity, intellectual disparagement, and pay inequity,” it ultimately serves as an “institutionalized bar to professional advancement divorced from any reasonable measure of merit.” This essay takes Stanchi’s framing of 405(c) as …

Nothing Says "I Love You" Like A Correct Bluebook Citation & Formatting The 1l Brief, Jason Tubinis, Heather Simmons

Presentations

Law Librarians Heather Simmons and Jason Tubinis walked students through the necessary formatting for 1L brief success, as well as shared their top tips for Bluebook citations. Formatting topics included Table of Authorities, Table of Contents, page numbering, and styles. Students were encouraged to bring their laptops for hands on help with both Mac and PC versions of Microsoft Word.

Access To Law Or Access To Lawyers? Master's Programs In The Public Educational Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

The general decline in juris doctor (“J.D.”) law school applicants and enrollment over the last decade has coincided with the rise of a new breed of law degree. Whether known as a master of jurisprudence, juris master, master of legal studies, or other names, these graduate degrees all have a target audience in common: adult professionals who neither are nor seek to become practicing attorneys. Inside legal academia and among the practicing bar, these degrees have been accompanied by expressed concerns that they detract from the traditional core public mission of law schools—educating lawyers. This Article argues that non-lawyer master’s …

Still Writing At The Master’S Table: Decolonizing Rhetoric In Legal Writing For A “Woke” Legal Academy, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the author wrote Writing At the Master’s Table: Reflections on Theft, Criminality, and Otherness in the Legal Writing Profession almost 10 years ago, her aim was to bring a Critical Race Theory/Feminism (CRTF) analysis to scholarship about the marginalization of White women law professors of legal writing. She focused on the convergence of race, gender, and status to highlight the distinct inequities women of color face in entering their ranks. The author's concern was that barriers to entry for women of color made it less likely that the existing legal writing professorate, predominantly White and female, would problematize the …

The Deconstructed Issue-Spotting Exam, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article proposes a teaching technique for use in large, Socratic-style law school classes to embed exam preparation, formative assessment, and lawyering simulations in the course without overburdening the professor or students. This technique is sustainable, yet highly efficacious for students.

Law schools nationwide are implementing new reforms pushing law schools toward stronger assessment techniques and client-based simulations better preparing students for the practice of law. Many law schools have implemented these reforms around the margins or outside of the traditional doctrinal course. Law schools have generally added new classes with experiential learning components or with simulations integrated into the …

On The Values Of Words, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mary Norris' Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Kory Stamper's Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries use observations about language as a touchstone for a nuanced examination of deeper truths about language, culture, and law in a changing world. In so doing, they point to deeper truths about the use of language and its consequences. Law students, lawyers, and law professors will benefit from journeying with Norris and Stamper towards the goal of crafting prose that is clear, accurate, and inclusive. In particular, the legal community will benefit from the books' efforts to define …

De-Grading Assessment: Rejecting Rubrics In Favor Of Authentic Analysis, Deborah L. Borman

Seattle University Law Review

Assigning grades is the least joyful duty of the law professor. In the current climate of legal education, law professors struggle with issues such as increased class size, providing “practice-ready” graduates, streamlining assignments, and accountability in assessment. In an effort to ease the burden of grading written legal analyses, individual professors or law school writing programs or both may develop articulated rubrics to assess students’ written work. Rubrics are classification tools that allow us to articulate our judgment of a written work. Rubrics may be as extensive as twenty categories and subcategories or may be limited to only a few …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Better Briefs, Lydia Fearing

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming