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 ...

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 ...

Table Of Contents And Masthead, Cameron Fraser

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Content Analysis Of Section 1983 Litigation Against Reserve Police Officers, Michael Broadus

Master's Theses

Police studies have well developed a demonstrative framework for detailing risks which generate financially-detrimental civil litigation – particularly regarding 42 U.S.C. §1983. Conversely, though, police studies have given little attention to the often-used but differentially-trained reserve police officer. Primarily replicating the methodologies of Kappeler, Kappeler, and del Carmen (1993) and Ross (2000), this descriptive study sought to fill this void via a manifest content approach to purposively select a sample of Section 1983 cases decided by U.S. District Courts over a 16-year period (2001-2016) to determine: (1) if significant liability was generated by reserve officers, (2) the main ...

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Journey To Universal Legal Aid: Protecting The Criminally Accuseds' Charter Rights By Introducing A Public Defender System To Ontario, Benjamin D. Schnell

Western Journal of Legal Studies

There is a significant gap between the demand for legal aid and Legal Aid Ontario (LAO)'s ability to fulfill that demand, meaning that there is a sizeable percentage of the population who, when facing criminal charges, neither qualify for legal aid nor can afford legal representation. This has the effect of denying the accused their Charter protected right to a fair trial and their ability to make full answer and defence, as studies show that a self-represented accused faces significant barriers at trial leading to negative outcomes. The few mechanisms available to help assist a self- represented accused with ...

Weird Science: The Empircial Study Of Legal Writing/Describing Law’S Enterprise: Moving From Theory To Research Question To Research Design And Implementation, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

How We Built A Scholarly Working Group Devoted To Classical Legal Rhetoric (And How You Can Do The Same Thing With Other Legal Writing Subjects), Brian Larson, Kirsten K. Davis, Lori D. Johnson, Ted Becker, Susan E. Provenzano

Brian Larson

Tweets To A Young 1l, Rachel I. Gurvich

Faculty Publications

A series of eleven tweets ruminating about the author's law school experience received a positive and enthusiastic response from many lawyers, law professors, and law students, and ultimately caught the eye of one of the Green Bag’s editors. This short piece unpacks and contextualizes those tweets. The original tweets appear below, numbered as they first appeared on Twitter.

De-Grading Assessment: Rejecting Rubrics In Favor Of Authentic Analysis, Deborah L. Borman

Seattle University Law Review

Assigning grades is the least joyful duty of the law professor. In the current climate of legal education, law professors struggle with issues such as increased class size, providing “practice-ready” graduates, streamlining assignments, and accountability in assessment. In an effort to ease the burden of grading written legal analyses, individual professors or law school writing programs or both may develop articulated rubrics to assess students’ written work. Rubrics are classification tools that allow us to articulate our judgment of a written work. Rubrics may be as extensive as twenty categories and subcategories or may be limited to only a few ...

Chinese And American Forum On Legal Information And Law Libraries: Highlights From Hangzhou, Ning Han, Evelyn Ma, Wei Luo

Ning Han

The Fifth Biennial Conference of the Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries (CAFLL) was held in Hangzhou, China, June 1-2, 2017. More than sixty law school deans, law librarians, and law professors from more than fifty law schools in China attended the conference. Overseas attendees included more than twenty-five law librarians and library directors from Germany, Canada, as well as the presidents of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and International Association of Law Libraries (IALL).

Table Of Contents And Masthead, Cameron Fraser

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Better Briefs, Lydia Fearing

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

Articles

Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In ...

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight: Pro Bono Collaborative Aci Civil Legal Clinics Project Expands To Women's Facility (05-03-2018), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

“And/Or” And The Proper Use Of Legal Language, Ira P. Robbins

Maryland Law Review

The use of the term and/or is pervasive in legal language. Lawyers use it in all types of legal contexts—including statutes, contracts, and pleadings. Beginning in the 1930s, however, many judges decided that the term and/or should never be used in legal drafting. Ardent attacks on the term included charges that it was vague, if not meaningless, with some authorities declaring it to be a “Janus-faced verbal monstrosity,” an “inexcusable barbarism,” a “mongrel expression,” an “abominable invention,” a “crutch of sloppy thinkers,” and “senseless jargon.” Still today, critics maintain that the construct and/or is inherently ambiguous ...

Legal Corpus Linguistics: Gambling To Gaming Language Powers And Probabilities, Kezziah Dale

UNLV Gaming Law Journal

No abstract provided.

"Fear Itself": What Legal Writers Can Learn From Fdr's Iconic Moment, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article concerns President Roosevelt's timeless faceoff with fear from the inaugural podium in the depths of the Great Depression. After surveying the dire national emergency that faced the new administration more than eight decades ago, the article draws lessons about sound rhetoric for today's legal writers.

What We Still Don't Know About What Persuades Judges – And Some Ways We Might Find Out, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Over 25 years ago, in his foreword to the first volume of Legal Writing, Chris Rideout nailed it: legal writing as actually practiced by lawyers and judges needs to improve, “[b]ut more fundamental inquiry into legal writing...is needed as well.” The intervening decades have seen many laudable efforts on the latter front, as our collective scholarly discipline, then in its infancy, has matured. But one particular question that Rideout identified remains largely unaddressed by our discipline, although recent developments suggest a welcome increase in attention to the topic. Specifically, Rideout explained that our field did not know as ...

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.