Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Communication (2)
- Language (2)
- Law professors (2)
- Law reform (2)
- Legal drafting (2)
-
- Scholarship (2)
- Ambiguity (1)
- American Law Institute (1)
- Empirical studies (1)
- Law schools (1)
- Legal information (1)
- Legal writing (1)
- Legislative process (1)
- Legislatures (1)
- Logic (1)
- Private law (1)
- Public law (1)
- Publications (1)
- Restatements of the Law (1)
- Statutory construction (1)
- Statutory interpretation (1)
- Storage (1)
- Structure (1)
- Terminology (1)
- Uniform Law Commission (1)
- Uniform acts (1)
- Vagueness (1)
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Legal Writing and Research
Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Articles
In this Article, Professor Waggoner, newly retired, provides a retrospective on his career in law reform. He was inspired to write the Article by a number of articles by law professors explaining why they write. He contrasts law-reform work with law-review writing, pointing out that the work product of a law-reform reporter is directed to duly constituted law-making authorities. He notes that before getting into the law-reform business, he had authored or co-authored law review articles that advocated reform, but he also notes that those articles did not move the law a whit. The articles did, however, lead to his …
Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White
Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White
Articles
Assume a bright hypothetical social scientist - call her Phoebe - who is completely ignorant of legal research as it is practiced in today's law schools. Phoebe might speculate about legal research as follows. First, she would note that the law schools are joined with and are the exclusive source of the practitioners of a profession. Second, she would note that commercial and legal actors rub up against and are influenced by the law in countless ways every day. Third, she might remark that this interaction occurs practically on the doorsteps of our law schools. Unlike anthropologists, who may have …
Controlling Inadvertent Ambiguity In The Logical Structure Of Legal Drafting By Means Of The Prescribed Definitions Of The A-Hohfeld Structural Language, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon
Controlling Inadvertent Ambiguity In The Logical Structure Of Legal Drafting By Means Of The Prescribed Definitions Of The A-Hohfeld Structural Language, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon
Articles
Two principal sources of imprecision in legal drafting (vagueness and ambiguity) are identified and illustrated. Virtually all of the ambiguity imprecision encountered in legal discourse is ambiguity in the language used to express logical structure, and virtually all of· the imprecision resulting is inadvertent. On the other hand, the imprecision encountered in legal writing that results from vagueness is frequently, if not most often, included there deliberately; the drafter has considered it and decided that the vague language· best accomplishes the purpose at hand. This paper focuses on the use of some defined terminology for minimizing inadvertent ambiguity in the …
Better Organization Of Legal Knowledge, Layman E. Allen, Tomoyuki Ohta
Better Organization Of Legal Knowledge, Layman E. Allen, Tomoyuki Ohta
Articles
The increasing need of legislatures to draft complicated statutes, e.g., the Internal Revenue Code, requires the development of new techniques for defining and communicating complicated policies both accurately and understandably. At present, these complicated statutes are expressed in long, convoluted sentences with frequent uses of exceptions and limitations. Current drafting technique, with its inadequacies, often hinders a comprehensive understanding of the policy being communicated and often fails to communicate the policy accurately. Moreover, with the voluminous increase of legal literature in recent times, legal researchers experience increasing difficulty in attempting to retrieve relevant judicial and administrative interpretations. The authors propose …