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Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Lawyers Serving Gods, Visible And Invisible, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

A critique of the American legal profession can be framed through the metaphor of idolatry, specifically the proclivity of lawyers to serve visible rather than invisible interests in their work. This proclivity has ramifications ranging from broad matters like lawyers' responses to deeply embedded social injustices to specific matters such as the excessive focus on pecuniary interests in ordinary legal representation and the high level of dissatisfaction that many lawyers experience in their careers. Using as a lens biblical teaching concerning idolatry, this article begins by describing "visible" as opposed to "invisible" interests in the context of legal practice. It …

People Of The Book: Judaism’S Influence On American Legal Scholarship, My Journey From Judaism To Jewish Law, Donna Litman

Faculty Scholarship

My personal study of the Torah and the Talmud as an adult has enhanced my legal scholarship and helped shape my current thinking on legal theory. At the same time, my professional legal training and experience as a law professor has shaped my understanding of Judaism and provided a legal terminology and a lens by which to view the array of Jewish laws. A confluence of events helped shape my personal and professional journey.

Pope Francis And The Vocation Of The Lawyer: Reflections On Service And Responsibility, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

Through the years, Catholic lawyers have had many opportunities and invitations to reflect on their profession as a vocation due to the guidance that can be found in Sacred Scripture, the examples of saints who were themselves members of the legal profession, the teachings of church leaders, and the insights of religious writers on the vocation of the lawyer, to name but a few.

More recently, Pope Francis has also offered guidance as to what a life in the law might mean and what might characterize the vocation to practice law today. This guidance is not to be found in …

“A Witness First Lives The Life He Proposes:” Evangelization And The Catholic Lawyer, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

This essay was presented at the lecture for legal professionals in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 21, 2015. The roots of the word evangelization are, literally, in the words that mean “to bring good news.” We live in a world that craves good news and, by virtue of our Baptism, all of us – lawyers included – are called to bring good news to a world that, despite all appearances to the contrary, aches for good news and deeply yearns to know the God from whom all good news comes, and to whom all good news leads. I am convinced that …

The Word And The Law, James Boyd White

Articles

In this Article I shall first give a brief account of Milner Ball's book, The Word and the Law, saying something about the interesting and important way in which it connects theology, literature, and law. I shall then give a little more content to what I say about this achievement by engaging in a kind of reading of two texts, one theological and one literary, connecting both to the law. I mean this reading simultaneously to be my own and to reflect something of what I have learned from Milner. Another way to put this is to say that …

Interview With Azizah Al-Hibri, Hisham Elkoustaf, Azizah Al-Hibri, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

For transcript, click the Download button above. For video index, click the link below.

Professor Azizah al-Hibri (L '85) is a Professor Emerita at the University of Richmond Law School, having served on the faculty from 1992 until her retirement in 2012. Her work has centered on developing an Islamic jurisprudence and body of Islamic law that are gender equitable and promote human rights and democratic governance. Professor al-Hibri has authored numerous book chapters, essays, and law review articles on these subjects, and her work has appeared in the highly respected Journal of Law and Religion, Harvard International Review …

Is There An Implicit Theology In The Practice Of Ordinary Law?, Joseph Vining

Articles

We should have a text to help us-lawyers and theologians almost always do. Consider this from Wordsworth, and ask whether it goes too far if Wordsworth were thought to be speaking to the practicing lawyer: Here you stand, Adore, and worship, when you know it not; Pious beyond the intention of your thought; Devout above the meaning of your will. -Yes, you have felt, and may not cease to feel. The estate of Man would be indeed forlorn If false conclusions of the reasoning Power Made the Eye blind, and closed the passages Through which the Ear converses with the …

How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White

Articles

I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …

Faith And The Lawyer's Practice Symposium: Law Religion And The Public Good, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

If there is a religious way to read, is there a religious way to be a lawyer? More and more lawyers, judges and scholars are answering yes to that question. We heard earlier from Cardinal Bevilacqua about the history of the Religious Lawyering Movement, which blossomed in the 1990s. There was writing about the law and religion before that time." We can date religious lawyering as a body of work in mainstream legal literature, as Cardinal Bevilacqua did, to the work of Professor Thomas Shaffer in the 1980s.Why did this movement take off in the 1990s? Again, what accounts for …

Religion And The Public Defender, Sadiq Reza

Articles & Chapters

It takes a special breed to have the understanding, compassion

and dedication to do what criminal defense lawyers do .... As

for public defenders - they are doing God's work. If Christ had

been a lawyer, he would have been a public defender.

Virtually all public defenders fight a daily battle against burnout

and the creeping erosion of confidence that inevitably accompany

defending acts we cannot condone and protecting those who are

the source of so much harm and grief. . . . Whether the process

unfolds subtly or suddenly, all defenders must confront the disturbing

consequences of their zealous …

Professing Professionals: Christian Pilots On The River Of Law, Daniel O. Conkle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

A Symposium Precis, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

To Save A Life: Why A Rabbi And A Jewish Lawyer Must Disclose A Client Confidence Symposium: Executing The Wrong Person: The Professionals' Ethical Dilemmas, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

As adopted by courts and legislatures, lawyer's ethical codes have the force of law. They require a lawyer to keep information confidential unless the lawyer knows the client will commit a future crime. Jewish tradition generally forbids the disclosure of confidential information as "a terrible invasion of another person's privacy."This interdiction, rooted in the Torah's prohibition on talebearing, applies even when the information disclosed is true. The great medieval commentator, Maimonides, observed that gossip "ruins the world.” He further reproached "the evil tongue of the slander-monger who speaks disparagingly of one's fellow, even if the truth is told." Accordingly, the …

The Word On Trial, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Milner Ball's extraordinary book, The Word and the Law, begins with a narrative account of "seven practices in law." The seven practitioners Ball brings to life for the reader share two powerful traits: they all, in quite different ways, use law to lessen the multiple sufferings of various communities of poor people, and they all, by doing so, strengthen the communities within which and for which they labor. The reader gains from these accounts not only a sympathetic understanding of the lives of seven lawyers, but a renewed sense of the possibilities their practices present. This can be put any …

Legal Affinities, Joseph Vining

Articles

Not long ago, any question of the kind "How may theology serve as a resource in understanding law?" would have been hardly conceivable among lawyers. When Lon Fuller brought out his first book in 1940, The Law in Quest of Itself, he could think of no better way of tagging his adversary the legal positivist than to note a "parallel between theoretical theology and analytical jurisprudence." Two decades later, in the name of realism, Thurman Arnold dismissed Henry Hart's non-positivist jurisprudence in harsh terms. A master of the cutting phrase, he confidently entitled his attack "Professor Hart's Theology." Two decades …

Slippered Feet Aboard The African Queen, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Milner Ball, a professor, has characterized property ownership as “the apparatus of bulwark law.” This Article argues that that characterization was premature. The Author suggests that the bulwark-like difficulties in property law are less the essence of ownership than a perversion of ownership.

The Balance Sheet Of Law And Religion, Frank E. Horack Jr.

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.