Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Stylish Legal Citation, Alexa Z. Chew

Working Papers

Can legal citations be stylish? Is that even a thing? Yes, and this Article explains why and how. The usual approach to writing citations is as a separate, inferior part of the writing process, a perfunctory task that satisfies a convention but isn’t worth the attention that stylish writers spend on the “real” words in their documents. This Article argues that the usual approach is wrong. Instead, legal writers should strive to write stylish legal citations—citations that are fully integrated with the prose to convey information in a readable way to a legal audience.

Prominent legal style expert ...

Justice Kennedy And The First Amendment, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews some of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most significant contributions to First Amendment jurisprudence. These include his calls for absolute protection for pure political speech, his strong protection for commercial speech, his distaste for campaign finance reform laws that censored speech, his general concern for the silencing of sexual expression, his coercion test in Establishment Clause cases, and his significant failure in the public-employee free-speech decision Garcetti v. Ceballos.

A Bibliography Of Faculty Scholarship, Law Library

Scholarly Articles and Other Contributions

The purpose of this bibliography is to record in one place the substantial body of scholarship produced by the current faculty at the Catholic University, Columbus School of Law. From its humble beginnings under the tutelage of founding Dean William Callyhan Robinson, through its adolescent period when, like so many other American law schools, it was trying to define its pedagogical niche, to its eventual merger with the Columbus University Law School in 1954, the law school at Catholic University has always retained a scholarly and remarkably productive faculty. The sheer quantity of writing, the breadth of research and the ...

Physician-Assisted Death: A Selected Annotated Bibliography, Alyssa Thurston

Alyssa Thurston

Approaches To Justice, Katie Pleiss

Georgia Undergraduate Research Conference (GURC)

Approaches to Justice

How do we seek justice in this country? What issues surround incarceration? How are the effects of mass incarceration felt in local communities? I am currently addressing these research questions, among others, as I engage with the criminal justice system through my year-long research at Emory’s Oxford College and in prisons and with nonprofits throughout Georgia. I am reading and evaluating texts centering around theories of incarceration, the death penalty, and criminal justice reform, including Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercyand Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow. I also interned with The Georgia Innocence Project this ...

Index To Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff's Advocate Articles, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Faculty Scholarship

This document functions as an index to help readers to navigate Professor Fordyce-Ruff's Advocate column articles better.

Recalibrating Cy Pres Settlements To Restore The Equilibrium, Michael J. Slobom

Dickinson Law Review

Class action settlement funds become “non-distributable” when class members fail to claim their share of the settlement or the cost of distribution exceeds the value of individual claims. Before 1974, parties had two options for disposing of non-distributable funds: escheatment to the state or reversion to the defendant. Both options undermine unique objectives of the class action—namely, compensating small individual harms and deterring misconduct.

To balance the undermining effects of escheatment and reversion, courts incorporated the charitable trust doctrine of cy pres into the class action settlements context. Cy pres distributions direct non-distributable settlement funds to charities whose work ...

Front Matter

Dickinson Law Review

No abstract provided.

Visibly (Un)Just: The Optics Of Grand Jury Secrecy And Police Violence, Nicole Smith Futrell

Dickinson Law Review

Police violence has become more visible to the public through racial justice activism and social justice advocates’ use of technology. Yet, the heightened visibility of policing has had limited impact on transparency and accountability in the legal process, particularly when a grand jury is empaneled to determine whether to issue an indictment in a case of police violence. When a grand jury decides not to indict, the requirement of grand jury secrecy prevents public disclosure of the testimony, witnesses, and evidence presented to the grand jury. Grand jury secrecy leaves those who have seen and experienced the act of police ...

Fire, Aim, Ready! Militarizing Animus: “Unit Cohesion” And The Transgender Ban, Eric Merriam

Dickinson Law Review

President Trump’s currently litigated “transgender ban,” which excludes transgender persons from military service, is premised in part upon a claim that transgender persons’ presence in the military adversely affects “unit cohesion.” This use of identity- based “unit cohesion” as a justification for excluding a group from military service is the latest episode in a long history of the government asserting “unit cohesion” to justify excluding people from military service based on their identities. This Article contends that unit cohesion, when premised on identity, is always an impermissible justification for exclusion from military service because it is unconstitutional animus. Though ...

The Need To Revisit Legal Education In An Era Of Increased Diagnoses Of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity And Autism Spectrum Disorders, Heidi E. Ramos-Zimmerman

Dickinson Law Review

The ever-fluctuating rhetoric from experts, in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders, has led to outdated notions and perplexity surrounding attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This Article tries to clarify some of the confusion. Better understanding of these disorders is imperative for today’s law professor, since law schools are likely admitting more students diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. This Article discusses the need for change in legal instruction and explores the link between the two disorders. An examination of recent history illuminates some of the commonly held misunderstandings and highlights the disparity in the diagnoses ...

The Uncertain Status Of The Manifest Disregard Standard One Decade After Hall Street, Stuart M. Boyarsky

Dickinson Law Review

The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) enables parties to obtain quick and final resolution to disputes without incurring the costs, delays, and occasional publicity of litigation. Indeed, section 10 of the FAA enumerates four specific grounds on which courts may vacate arbitral awards: corruption, fraud, impartiality, and misconduct or incompetence. Yet over the past 60 years, a debate has raged over the existence of an additional ground: the arbitrator’s manifest disregard of the law.

The Supreme Court first enounced this standard in dicta in its 1953 decision in Wilko v. Swan. Over next four decades, every federal circuit court slowly ...

The Robot-Transporter: Sex Trafficking, Autonomous Vehicles, And Criminal Liability For Manufacturers, Olivia Phillips

Dickinson Law Review

Despite global condemnation, sex trafficking continues to plague our world. Even in developed countries, the problem persists. Technological advancements, like the Internet, have spurred the development of organized sex trafficking networks and have made “transactions” easier. Although law enforcement agencies have tried to adapt their investigative techniques to combat the problem, developments in technology move at a much quicker rate.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will present a new set of challenges for law enforcement agencies in the fight against sex trafficking. In the not-too-distant future, AVs, or “self-driving cars,” will dominate the roadways. An AV will be completely aware of the ...

Coinsensus: The Need For Uniform National Virtual Currency Regulations, Anisha Reddy

Dickinson Law Review

Google search volume for bitcoin and bitcoin-related keywords increased by as much as 1000 percent in 2017 from previous years. This increased interest comes hand-in-hand with increased regulatory and legislative scrutiny. Currently, there is disparate regulation for virtual currencies across national and state borders alike. States’ promulgation of various and incongruous virtual currency regulations have forced service providers to withdraw from different states within the country. However, transactions are not contained within state lines, and disparate state-by-state regulation is impracticable.

The Uniform Law Commission recognized the need for uniform guidance for those entering the North American market and drafted the ...

Law Library Blog (October 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Holy Grail? Designing And Teaching An Integrated Doctrine And Drafting Course, Claire C. Robinson May

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

I’ve long considered teaching doctrine and skills together in a single course to be the holy grail of legal education. If we could do so successfully, we might make significant strides in providing a legal education that better prepares our students to be practicing lawyers. In spring 2016, my colleague Professor April Cherry and I took the plunge and collaboratively offered a course titled Estates and Trusts: Doctrine and Drafting at our institution, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. This essay describes our experience and lessons learned pursuing the holy grail.

Law 'Reviews'? The Changing Roles Of Law Schools And The Publications They Sponsor, Leslie Francis

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The current structure of law reviews is deeply problematic. It does not serve students, law faculty, or legal scholarship very well. There is much to learn from the early development and changes in law reviews over the years to inform law schools as they reevaluate the role of their journals in the education they provide their students and in the lives of their faculty.

This Book Is Just My Type, Jennifer Babcock

Publications

Jennifer Babcock reviews Typography for Lawyers by Matthew Butterick (2d ed., O'Connor's 2015), 240 pages.

Table Of Contents And Masthead, Cameron Fraser

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Citation Part Iii: Using Citation To Convey Textual Meaning, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, Jason G. Dykstra

Faculty Scholarship

Remember, at our core, attorneys are advocates, and one of the purposes of citation is to prove to the reader that she can trust one's research-to prove that the law is what one states it is and that it works the way one stated it does.

In addition to understanding the language of citation and using the correct form, citation can also increase the level of trust one's reader will have in one's positions in two ways: signals and explanatory parentheticals.