Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Form And Substance: Standards For Promotion And Retention Of Legal Writing Faculty On Clinical Tenure Track, Melissa H. Weresh

Golden Gate University Law Review

This Article first briefly traces the development of legal writing programs and the various forms of job security currently afforded to legal writing faculty. It then examines standards for promotion and retention of legal writing faculty eligible for long-term contracts under 405(c), specifically in terms of titles, rank, and term of employment contracts, and the categories of criteria applicable to promotion for each term of employment. Finally, the Article examines some of the procedural aspects associated with promotion and retention of legal writing faculty under a 405(c) model, particularly in terms of evaluation and objection procedures.

A Paean, Nancy Bellhouse May

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Abraham Lincoln As A Legal Writer, Judith D. Fischer

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

True North: Navigating For The Transfer Of Learning In Legal Education, Tonya Kowalski

Seattle University Law Review

As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how …

Legal Writing: The View From Within, J. Christopher Rideout, Jill J. Ramsfield

Mercer Law Review

"[Wiriting is an act of identity . . . ."

We have seen that law professors systematically focus their students' attention on layers of textual and legal authority when deciphering the conflict stories at the heart of legal cases. But what happens to the people in these stories? What aspects of their identities and lives remain important when refracted through this legal lens? We can ask as well: What aspects of the law students' and professors' lives and experiences are considered to be salient during the conversation?

Why is writing hard to do? For lots of reasons, most people would …

Reflections, Remembrances, And Mimesis: One Person's View Of The Significance Of The 25th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Legal Writing Institute, David T. Ritchie

Mercer Law Review

I. INTRODUCTION

In a planning meeting for the 2009 Mercer Law Review Symposium celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), a colleague of mine asked what I thought the significance of that event was to legal education. Not having a pithy and erudite answer ready at hand, I simply said "considerable." This answer seemed to me self-evident; the LWI had, after all, changed the way legal writing is taught in American law schools. It had also worked hard-along with the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD)-to increase the pay and status of legal writing …

Introduction To The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years Of Teaching & Scholarship, Kristin B. Gerdy

Mercer Law Review

The Legal Writing Institute (LWI), which was founded in 2004, is a professional organization dedicated to improving legal writing through teaching, discussion, and scholarship about legal writing, analysis, and research, both in law practice and in the academy. LWI boasts a membership of more than 2500, including members from more than thirty-eight countries, and it is the second largest organization of law professors in the United States. LWI also sponsors Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal established in 1988 as a forum for exchange of scholarly ideas and opinions about legal writing.

As …

Plenary I: The Historical Perspective Featuring Laurel Currie Oates, Jill J. Ramsfield & Mary Beth Beazley With Mary Garvey Algero As Moderator, And Plenary Ii: Teaching Marilyn R. Walter, M.H. Sam Jacobson & Carol Mccrehan Parker With Robin Boyle As Moderator

Mercer Law Review

The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years of Teaching & ScholarshipA Symposium of the Mercer Law Review
November 6, 2009Morning Session

Jill J. Ramsfield, Introduction: J. Christopher Rideout, Luncheon Speaker; And Kristin B. Gerdy & Pamela Lysaght, Presentation Of Mary S. Lawrence Award

Mercer Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Writing Life, Linda H. Edwards

Mercer Law Review

This Essay is written on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), celebrated at the Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law, the LWI's current home. In a sense the Essay is retrospective, for it is written to honor the scholars whose work has moved us toward a vision of legal writing scholarship and all it can offer. Many of those experienced and inspiring scholars have kindly offered their advice for inclusion in this Essay. That advice is probably the most important content included here, and it is placed, appropriately, at the end of …

Legal Writing Scholarship, Making Strange, And The Aesthetics Of Legal Rhetoric, Jack L. Sammons

Mercer Law Review

Some of the central issues addressed at the 2009 Mercer Law Review Symposium "Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Founding of the Legal Writing Institute" involved questions about the scholarship potential of the discipline of legal writing. Those on the fringe of the academy, as legal writing professors are now and as clinicians were in the 1960s, often offer the clearest perspective on it, and in the case of the legal academy, on the practice itself. What scholarship, I wondered as I listened to the speakers, would best take advantage of this privileged perspective and of legal writing's necessary focus …

The Curse Of Tradition In The Law School Classroom: What Casebook Professors Can Learn From Those Professors Who Teach Legal Writing, M.H. Sam Jacobson

Mercer Law Review

The typical law school pedagogy suffers from a ham butt problem. As the story goes, a woman was preparing a ham dinner when she carefully cut off the ham butt before putting the ham in the oven to bake. A friend asked her why she did that. She said she did it because her mother did it. Why did her mother do it? She had no idea. So she asked her mother, why do you cut off the ham butt before putting it in the oven? Her mother said she did it because her mother did it. What was the …

Plenary Iii: Scholarship Featuring Linda Berger, Linda H. Edwards & Terrill Pollman With Kirsten Davis As Moderator; And Plenary Iv: Program Design Featuring Suzanne R. Rowe, Susan Hanley Duncan, & Eric B. Easton With Brooke Bowman As Moderator

Mercer Law Review

The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years of Teaching & Scholarship

A Symposium of the Mercer Law Review November 6, 2009

Afternoon Session

Stem Cell Research And Cloning For Human Reproduction: An Analysis Of The Laws, The Direction In Which They May Be Heading In Light Of Recent Developments, And Potential Constitutional Issues, Catherine D. Payne

Mercer Law Review

I. INTRODUCTION

The world is continuously changing before our eyes. New scientific and technological developments are constantly being made. Not surprisingly, these changes usually occur well before the law is ready to respond and accommodate them. One of the most recent developments that will soon be pushing the limits of the law is in the world of science. Researchers around the world have been independently working to see if they can unlock the secrets to the development of reproductive cells. Ultimately, the research teams are hoping to learn what causes stem cells to differentiate into sperm and egg cells. One …

Changing Fashions In Advocacy: 100 Years Of Brief-Writing Advice, Helen A. Anderson

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

The Language Of Supreme Court Briefs: A Large-Scale Quantitative Investigation, Brady Coleman, Quy Phung

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

How Courts Use Wikipedia, Joseph L. Gerken

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh

Michigan Law Review

People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same. But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference …

Rationalism In Regulation, Christopher C. Demuth, Douglas H. Ginsburg

Michigan Law Review

Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, by Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore, aims to convince those who favor more government regulation-in particular environmental groups-that they should embrace cost-benefit analysis and turn it to their purposes. Coauthored by a prominent law school dean and a recent student with a background in environmental advocacy, the book is a jarring combination of roundhouse political polemics and careful academic argument. Sweeping pronouncements are followed by qualifications that leave the sweep of the pronouncements in doubt- rather like the give-and-take of the law school classroom …

Nudge, Choice Architecture, And Libertarian Paternalism, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

By all external appearances, Nudge is a single book-two covers, a single spine, one title. But put these deceptive appearances aside, read the thing, and you will actually find two books-Book One and Book Two. Book One begins with the behavioral economist's view that sometimes individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare. Indeed, given the propensity of human beings for cognitive errors (e.g., the availability bias) and the complexity of decisions that need to be made (e.g., choosing prescription plans), individuals often make mistakes. Enter here the idea of the nudge-the deliberate effort to channel people into …

Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith

Michigan Law Review

The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness" (p. 36), and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment" (p. 2). Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulat[e] a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue" (p. 2), one that …

Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown

Michigan Law Review

It is a bizarre state of affairs that criminal law has no coherent description or explanation. We have standard tropes to define criminal law, but they obscure as much as they clarify and are honored in the breach as much as the rule. Crimes, for instance, are defined by wrongdoing and culpability; to be guilty, one must do a wrongful act in a blameworthy manner, that is, as a responsible agent without excuse or justification. And crimes define public wrongs, which are distinct from private wrongs. Further, we criminalize only harmful conduct, or risk-creating conduct, or immoral conduct, or conduct …

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …

A Planet By Any Other Name…, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

Michigan Law Review

In case you haven't heard, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (and maybe it never was). In grade school, we all memorized the planets, giving little thought to what made something a planet besides revolving around the Sun and being part of some familiar mnemonic. However, scientific discoveries about Pluto and other parts of space led scientists to question Pluto's planetary status and ultimately, to strip Pluto of its standing among the planets. This leads to the inevitable question-what is a planet?-which turns out to be a more difficult and fascinating question than one might think. The Pluto Files grapples with …

A Portrait Of The Internet As A Young Man, Ann Bartow

Michigan Law Review

In brief, the core theory of Jonathan Zittrain's 2008 book The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It is this: good laws, norms, and code are needed to regulate the Internet, to prevent bad laws, norms, and code from compromising its creative capabilities and fettering its fecund flexibility. A far snarkier if less alliterative summary would be "We have to regulate the Internet to preserve its open, unregulated nature." Zittrain posits that either a substantive series of unfortunate Internet events or one catastrophic one will motivate governments to try to regulate cyberspace in a way that promotes maximum stability, …

Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green

Michigan Law Review

A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner is not a great book, and it does not pretend to be one. Posner summarizes the economic crisis of 2008-09 and considers proposals to reduce current suffering and avoid future recurrence (p. xvi). But when the book's final edits were made in February 2009, it was still too soon for authoritative solutions or full accounts of what had happened. Instead, Posner wrote a conspicuously contemporary-and thus incomplete-description of the crisis as it looked to him at the time (p. xvii). Now one year later, readers may need a reminder about the value of …

The Price Of Conflict: War, Taxes, And The Politics Of Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Michigan Law Review

This Review proceeds in four parts, paralleling the chronological organization of War and Taxes. It focuses mainly on the book's analysis of the leading modern American wars, from the Civil War through the global conflicts of the twentieth century, up to the recent war on terror. Part I contrasts the tax policies of the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War to show how the Lincoln Administration was able to overcome Yankee resistance to wartime tax hikes to wage a war against a Southern Confederacy that resolutely resisted any type of centralized taxation until, of course, it was too late. …

Pining For Sustainability, Timothy M. Mulvaney

University of Richmond Law Review

In the legal academic community, there are significant positive signs demonstrating attention to sustainable practices, from course offerings to many day-to-day operations. Scholarly research also reflects this positive trend. Much of this recent scholarship assesses sustainability-focused regulatory and normative efforts to address the impacts associated with a warming planet in marked detail, and there is an additional plethora of writing on the many topics beyond the changing climate that raise sustainability questions.

Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Michigan Law Review

This Article offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient-breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated-damages clause. Economists claim that the theory of efficient breach allows us to predict when parties will choose to breach a contract if the legal remedy for breach is expectation damages. However, the economic assumption of rational wealth-maximizing actors fails to capture important, shared, nonmonetary values and incentives that shape behavior in predictable ways. When interpersonal obligations are informal or underspecified, people act in accordance with shared community norms, like the moral norm of keeping promises. However, when sanctions …

Preserving A Racial Hierarchy: A Legal Analysis Of The Disparate Racial Impact Of Legacy Preferences In University Admissions, Kathryn Ladewski

Michigan Law Review

Many public and private universities around the country employ legacy admissions preferences in order to give children of alumni special consideration in the admissions process. Such preferences disproportionately benefit white applicants at the cost of their nonwhite counterparts, because past generations of college students were less diverse than today's applicant pool. However, universities argue that their legacy preferences are justified because they assist in alumni fundraising efforts. This Note presents a statistical analysis to argue that legacy preferences are prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they have a discriminatory effect on minority college applicants and have not …