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University of Florida Levin College of Law

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Full-Text Articles in Legal Writing and Research

Fingerprints: An Impressionistic And Empirical Evaluation Of Richard Posner’S Impact On Contract Law, Jeffrey L. Harrison Jan 2019

Fingerprints: An Impressionistic And Empirical Evaluation Of Richard Posner’S Impact On Contract Law, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

Richard Posner’s retirement after 36 years on the federal bench presents an ideal opportunity to reflect on his sometimes controversial career as a scholar and a judge. Since his principal scholarly work, Economic Analysis of Law, has been cited in legal scholarship over 7500 times a good working hypothesis is that his impact on law has been substantial. This article considers his impact on contract law. Two lines of research were conducted: one line explores the impact of Judge Posner’s scholarly writings on judicial opinions; the other line examines the impact of his opinions on other courts.

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Fostering Student Authorship, Amy R. Mashburn, Sharon E. Rush Jan 2017

Fostering Student Authorship, Amy R. Mashburn, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this essay, we suggest that law schools may provide every student with the opportunity to become involved in the process of producing a publishable paper by establishing on-line repositories for student publications. We describe what such a program, which we call "student authorship," might look like and further explore several primary benefits that such a program would confer upon students.

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Moonlighting Sonata: Conflicts, Disclosure And The Scholar/Consultant, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn Jan 2017

Moonlighting Sonata: Conflicts, Disclosure And The Scholar/Consultant, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Although the impact of conflicting interests is of constant concern to those in legal education and other fields, a recent scholarly article and an extensive analysis in the New York Times suggest the problem is more pressing than ever. In the context of legal scholarship the problem arises when a professor is, in effect, employed by two entities. Disclosure of possible conflicts is the most commonly proposed response. The article argues that disclosure is merely a risk shifting devise that does not fully address the issue of bias. It draws on comparisons with products liability and legal ethics to suggest …

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A Matter Of Trust: Why The Time Is Right To Adopt The Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (Uelma) In Florida, Patricia Morgan Jan 2015

A Matter Of Trust: Why The Time Is Right To Adopt The Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (Uelma) In Florida, Patricia Morgan

Working Papers

The Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act is an important piece of legislation created by the Uniform Law Commission. It has been adopted in many states and is pending in several more. The Florida Bar is part of a national movement for Access to Justice – seeking solutions for citizens who need to access the judicial system but are of limited resources. UELMA would ensure that online state legal publications (such as Florida’s Administrative Code) would be authenticated and preserved. This would ensure that citizens can access the documents they need in order to pursue legal solutions.

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Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki Jan 2015

Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

U.S. law schools are hiring large proportions of J.D.-Ph.D.s in tenure-track faculty positions in an effort to increase the quantity and quality of empirical legal scholarship. That effort is failing. The new recruits bring methods and objectives unsuited to law. They produce lower-than-predicted levels of empiricism because they compete on the basis of methodological sophistication, devote time and resources to disputes over arcane issues in statistics and methodology, prefer to collaborate with other Ph.D.s, and intimidate empiricists whose work does not require high levels of methodological sophistication. In short, Ph.D.s impose the cultures of their disciplines on legal scholarship. Importing …

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State Documents Bibliography: Florida, Shira Megerman, Patricia Morgan Jan 2015

State Documents Bibliography: Florida, Shira Megerman, Patricia Morgan

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Florida State Documents Bibliography is a comprehensive document containing historic information on state documents published in Florida. The Bibliography includes information on Florida’s constitutions, legislative, judicial, and executive legal materials. Secondary sources, reference materials, and libraries open to the public are also included.

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Citations, Justifications, And The Troubled State Of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn Jan 2015

Citations, Justifications, And The Troubled State Of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Recent pedagogical, economic and technological changes require law schools to reevaluate their resource allocations. Although typically viewed in terms of curricular changes, it is important also to focus on the very significant investment in legal scholarship and its impact. Typically this has been determined by some version of citation counting with little regard for what it means to be cited. This Article discusses why this is a deeply flawed measure of impact. Much of that discussion is based on an empirical study the authors conducted. The investigation found that citation by other authors is highly influenced by the rank of …

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Stop Me If You’Ve Heard This Before: Transitions In Teaching Legal Research, Patricia Morgan Sep 2014

Stop Me If You’Ve Heard This Before: Transitions In Teaching Legal Research, Patricia Morgan

UF Law Faculty Publications

Law schools are being called upon to produce more “practice ready” graduates. To that end, the University of Florida added a librarian-taught first-year Legal Research course to its curriculum. As a result of the course addition, there was an impact on the existing Advanced Legal Research (ALR) course. For the first time, the ALR students had already received legal research instruction. This required adjustments in this higher level course.

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Websites With Free Legal Information, Patricia Morgan Nov 2013

Websites With Free Legal Information, Patricia Morgan

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Worldwide Access To Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication, Claire M. Germain Aug 2012

Worldwide Access To Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication, Claire M. Germain

Working Papers

This paper was originally presented at the World Library & Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012, as part of a panel on Promoting Global Access to Law: Developing an Open Access Index for Official Authenticated Legal Information, Part II. Europe. http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-day/2012-08-14. It focuses on worldwide access to the official word of the law, specifically to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements in different foreign countries. The importance of improving global access to foreign law was highlighted at a 2012 joint European Commission/Hague Conference on Private International …

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Legal Information Links For Public Librarians, Patricia Morgan, Lisa Parisi Jul 2010

Legal Information Links For Public Librarians, Patricia Morgan, Lisa Parisi

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Digitizing The World's Laws, Claire M. Germain Jan 2010

Digitizing The World's Laws, Claire M. Germain

Working Papers

Where does one find the foreign investment laws of Botswana? What about the copyright law of the Netherlands, the corporation laws of Japan, or the English translation of the Egyptian Civil Code? Already back in 1991, just before the internet, Wallace Baker remarked that “foreign law has become the daily bread of lawyers everywhere who formally had totally domestic practices.” Since then, the need to access the content of foreign law has increased exponentially. The importance of global access to foreign laws on the internet and how to improve it was recently highlighted at an international Meeting of Experts on …

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Find It Fast And Free: An Update On Florida And Federal Research On The Internet, Patricia Morgan Apr 2009

Find It Fast And Free: An Update On Florida And Federal Research On The Internet, Patricia Morgan

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Researching Initiatives And Referendums: A Guide For Florida, Elizabeth Outler Oct 2008

Researching Initiatives And Referendums: A Guide For Florida, Elizabeth Outler

UF Law Faculty Publications

In Florida, direct democracy at the state level consists entirely of the initiative method of amending the State constitution. This constitutional provision was partly a response to the State’s history of obstacles to affording equitable legislative representation to all its citizens, a struggle with roots dating back to the Reconstruction era. The State constitution, governing statutes and regulations, and the Division of Elections Web site serve as the primary sources of information and guidance for those interested in the process of amending the State constitution by citizen-sponsored initiative.

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The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results From A National Study, Jason P. Nance, Dylan J. Steinberg Jan 2008

The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results From A National Study, Jason P. Nance, Dylan J. Steinberg

UF Law Faculty Publications

The student-edited law review has been a much criticized institution. Many commentators have expressed their belief that students are unqualified to determine which articles should be published in which journals, but these discussions have been largely based on anecdotal evidence of how journals make publication decisions. It was against that backdrop that we undertook a national survey of law reviews in an attempt to determine how student editors responsible for making publication decisions went about their task. This article compiles the results of that survey, which received 191 responses from 163 different journals. We analyzed 56 factors that influence the …

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Have You Seen The New Library Bar?: Designing A Legal Research Toolbar, Jennifer L. Wondracek Nov 2007

Have You Seen The New Library Bar?: Designing A Legal Research Toolbar, Jennifer L. Wondracek

UF Law Faculty Publications

It seems like more and more people today are selecting their legal research results based on ease of access rather than the completeness of the results. After hearing one too many third-year law students say "I researched my entire paper on Google," I set off to create a tool that would satisfy both the desire for speed and the need for complete and authoritative research results. The tool is a legal research toolbar that integrates into a web browser and provides constant and quick access to library-sanctioned websites and databases. This paper walks readers through the design process of the …

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Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The “Progressive” Peril, Michael Allan Wolf Apr 2007

Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The “Progressive” Peril, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

In "How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution," Richard Epstein bemoans the growth of a dominant big government. How Progressives should receive a warm reception from the audience, lawyers and laypeople alike, who view the New Deal as a mistake of epic proportions. For the rest of us, significant gaps will still remain between, on the one hand, our understanding of the nation’s past and of the complex nature of constitutional lawmaking and, on the other, Epstein’s version of the nature of twentieth-century reform and Progressive jurisprudence.

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Legal Information Management In A Global And Digital Age: Revolution And Tradition, Claire M. Germain Jan 2007

Legal Information Management In A Global And Digital Age: Revolution And Tradition, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article presents an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries, and describes some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. It discusses the impact of globalization and the Internet on international and foreign law information, the free access to law movement and open access scholarship, and mass digitization projects, then turns to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long term access to born digital legal information and authentication of official digital legal information. It finally discusses new roles for librarians, called upon to evaluate the quality of information teach legal research methodology and be advocates …

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Ria Federal Tax Handbook 2006 (Book Review), Elizabeth Outler Feb 2006

Ria Federal Tax Handbook 2006 (Book Review), Elizabeth Outler

UF Law Faculty Publications

Review and explanation of the features of the RIA Federal Tax Handbook.

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Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics And Authors, 1978-2002, Laura A. Rosenbury Jan 2003

Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics And Authors, 1978-2002, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

In their call for papers, the organizers of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law’s Spring 2003 symposium “Why a Feminist Law Journal?” posed several questions, including: "Are feminist law journals a victim of their own success? Have they outlived their usefulness?" and "What is the state of feminist legal scholarship today? What constitutes feminist scholarship?" As a new member of the legal academy, my answers to their questions depend on answers to two more basic questions: What has been published in feminist law journals? And, how do those articles relate to feminist articles published in non-specialty, or flagship, law …

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Approaches To Statutory Interpretation And Legislative History In France, Claire M. Germain Jan 2003

Approaches To Statutory Interpretation And Legislative History In France, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

In France, Justice Jackson's question about where to look for the meaning of a statute would be phrased in broader terms and would not be limited to the question of whether to look only at the words of a statute or also at the legislative intent. French law starts from the premise that statutes and codes are the foundations of the legal system in the same way that cases are the foundation of the common-law system. Because of the primacy of written law in France, statutory interpretation lies at the heart of French law. Statutory interpretation is very flexible, and …

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“Gay Rights” For “Gay Whites”?: Race, Sexual Identity, And Equal Protection Discourse, Darren Lenard Hutchinson Jul 2000

“Gay Rights” For “Gay Whites”?: Race, Sexual Identity, And Equal Protection Discourse, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

While the resolution of the problem of gay and lesbian inequality will ultimately turn on a host of social, legal, political, and ideological variables, this Article argues that the success or failure of efforts to achieve legal equality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals will depend in large part on how scholars and activists in this field address questions of racial identity and racial subjugation. Commonly, these scholars and activists currently discuss race by use of analogies between “racial discrimination” and “sexual orientation discrimination,” or between “people of color” and “gays and lesbians.” On one level, the “comparative approach” …

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Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: A Vision For The Future, Claire M. Germain Mar 2000

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: A Vision For The Future, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

The law library community has been talking about how to ensure permanent public access to primary legal information, both US (state and federal), as well as international and foreign legal information. Web Mirror Sites present a new way to disseminate and preserve digital legal information, and offer a security backup for issuing agencies, an increasingly important factor in the new cyberspace world prone to computer hacking.

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Beyond The Rhetoric Of “Dirty Laundry”: Examining The Value Of Internal Criticism Within Progressive Social Movements And Oppressed Communities, Darren Lenard Hutchinson Oct 1999

Beyond The Rhetoric Of “Dirty Laundry”: Examining The Value Of Internal Criticism Within Progressive Social Movements And Oppressed Communities, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Several historical reasons explain opposition to the airing of internal criticism by scholars and activists within progressive social movements and by members of subordinate communities. Opponents often contend that such criticism might reinforce negative stereotypes of subordinate individuals and that reactionary movements and activists might appropriate and misuse negative portrayals of the oppressed. A related fear holds that internal criticism will dismantle political unity within oppressed communities and progressive social movements, thereby forestalling social change. While these concerns provide some context for understanding the resistance to internal criticism within progressive social movements, I argue in this essay that they do …

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Digital Legal Information: Ensuring Access To The "Official" Word Of The Law, Claire M. Germain Jul 1999

Digital Legal Information: Ensuring Access To The "Official" Word Of The Law, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state entities are widely available on publicly accessible Internet Web sites. Worldwide, official legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. Most of that digital information provides only a right of access, and no ownership, or control over the data, unless it is …

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Content And Quality Of Legal Information And Data On The Internet With A Special Focus On The United States, Claire M. Germain Jan 1999

Content And Quality Of Legal Information And Data On The Internet With A Special Focus On The United States, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as "authoritative," or "the official" word of the law) legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital …

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Ignoring The Sexualization Of Race: Heteronormativity, Critical Race Theory And Anti-Racist Politics, Darren Lenard Hutchinson Jan 1999

Ignoring The Sexualization Of Race: Heteronormativity, Critical Race Theory And Anti-Racist Politics, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article, a third in a series of related works, explores the representation of sexual identity within Critical Race Theory and other forms of anti-racist discourse. I argue, after examining representative texts, that anti-racist discourse is often "heteronormative" -- or centered around heterosexual experiences. Most commonly, anti-racist heteronormativity occurs when scholars and activists in the field fail to analyze the homophobic dimensions of acts or conditions of racial inequality and when they dismiss, either implicitly or explicitly, the "morality" of gay and lesbian equality claims. This Article recommends that scholars in Critical Race Theory and related fields adopt a more …

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Beyond Admissions: Racial Equality In Law Schools, Sharon E. Rush Oct 1996

Beyond Admissions: Racial Equality In Law Schools, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

Beginning with a discussion of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, this article discusses the meaning of “integration.” In McLaurin, the University of Oklahoma was forced to abandon its segregation policy and not separate black students from their white classmates in all settings (not just the classroom). The McLaurin decision raised the fundamental questions: "What is integration?" and "How is integration related to racial equality?" Significantly, the McLaurin Court clarifies that equality is premised on integration and that integration means more than just having a presence in an institution. …

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Internet For Legal Information: The U.S. Experience, Claire M. Germain, Patricia G. Court, Jean Wenger, Scott Childs Jan 1996

Internet For Legal Information: The U.S. Experience, Claire M. Germain, Patricia G. Court, Jean Wenger, Scott Childs

UF Law Faculty Publications

This empirical study starts from the newest medium, the internet, and explains briefly what researchers can expect to find there in terms of legal information, and how to find the needed information. It focuses on U.S. legal information, but also touches on foreign and international law. It includes comparisons with other legal research platforms and raises a few issues.

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The United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods: Guide To Research And Literature, Claire M. Germain Jan 1996

The United Nations Convention On Contracts For The International Sale Of Goods: Guide To Research And Literature, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article maps research strategies concerning the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and explores some research issues relating to the Convention and its interpretation. More specifically, it provides guidance on where to start, how to find the leading texts, commentaries and practitioners' guides, and where to find the texts of documents. Finally, this article describes some new Internet-based projects, examines where to find additional information, and examines how to keep "up-to-date" with this burgeoning area of international sales law.

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