Legal Profession Commons^™

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

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The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Imagining The Law-Trained Reader: The Faulty Description Of The Audience In Legal Writing Textbooks., Jessica E. Price

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In law schools today, first-year legal writing courses play a crucial role in helping students learn to communicate about the law. Many legal writing teachers approach legal writing education in a practical way, attempting to pass on their own experiences in law practice settings to students. Unfortunately, as other writers have observed, such reliance on personal knowledge about “what lawyers are like” may lead legal writing teachers to oversimplify a complicated matter – the needs and preferences of the audience for legal writing – and may even amount to indoctrination in stereotypes about law practice. This article offers a closer …

Multistable Figures: Sexual Orientation Visibility And Its Effects On The Experiences Of Sexual Minorities In The Courts, Todd Brower

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A multistable figure is a cognitive illusion in which a single drawing contains multiple, competing images. On first viewing a person will see one image, but not the other – it usually requires additional information to trigger the viewer’s awareness of the second image. However, once you know about the disparate figures in the illustration, you cannot erase that knowledge from your mind and see a sole image as you did originally. This inability to ignore information and its effect on subsequent experience has parallels in lesbians’ and gay men’s treatment in the courts.

Courts today are deeply involved in …