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Full-Text Articles in Legal Writing and Research
Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry
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?
Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison
Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual property law, describes a method of combining substantive law teaching with a species of what is commonly called "skills" training. The method involves assessing students not via traditional final exams but instead via research memos patterned after assignments that junior lawyers might encounter in actual legal practice. The essay grounds the method in the theoretical disposition known generally as "writing to learn." It argues that students are likely to learn intellectual property law effectively if they learn to practice as intellectual property lawyers, and specifically to write as intellectual …
Symbolic Logic: A Razor-Edged Tool For Drafting And Interpreting Legal Documents, Layman E. Allen
Symbolic Logic: A Razor-Edged Tool For Drafting And Interpreting Legal Documents, Layman E. Allen
Articles
A large amount of the litigation based on written instruments-whether statute, contract, will, conveyance or regulation-can be traced to the draftsman's failure to convey his meaning clearly. Frequently, of course, certain items may purposely be left ambiguous, but often the question in issue is due to an inadvertent ambiguity that could have been avoided had the draftsman clearly expressed what he intended to say. In this Article it is suggested that a new approach to drafting, using certain elementary notions of symbolic logic, can go a long way towards eliminating such inadvertent ambiguity. This new approach makes available to draftsmen …