Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Drafting New York Civil-Litigation Documents: Part Xxiv—Contempt Motions Continued, Gerald Lebovits

Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

A Proposal To The Aba: Integrating Legal Writing And Experiential Learning Into A Required, Six-Semester Curriculum That Trains Students In Core Competencies, 'Soft Skills,' And Real-World Judgment, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Experiential learning is not the answer to the problems facing legal education. Simulations, externships, and clinics are vital aspects of a real-world legal education, but they cannot alone produce competent graduates. The better approach is to create a required, six-semester experiential legal writing curriculum where students draft and re-draft the most common litigation documents and engage in simulations, including client interviews, mediation, depositions, settlement negotiations, and oral arguments in the order that they would in actual practice. In so doing, law schools can provide the time and context within which students can truly learn to think like lawyers, do what ...

Drafting New York Civil-Litigation Documents: Part Xxxiii—Contempt Motions Continued, Gerald Lebovits

Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

Drafting New York Civil-Litigation Documents: Part Xxxii—Contempt Motions, Gerald Lebovits

Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

Technology And Client Communications: Preparing Law Students And New Lawyers To Make Choices That Comply With The Ethical Duties Of Confidentiality, Competence, And Communication, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

That the use of technology has radically changed the legal profession is beyond dispute. Through technology, lawyers can now represent clients in faraway states and countries, and they can represent even local clients through a “virtual law office.” Gone are the times in which the lawyer’s choices for communicating with clients primarily involve preparing formal business letters to convey advice, holding in-person client meetings in the office, or conducting telephone calls with clients on landlines from the confines of the lawyer’s office. Not only do lawyers have choices about how to communicate with their clients, but they also ...

Judicial Influence And The United States Federal District Courts: A Case Study, Justin R. Hickerson

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

The Transmit Clause Test: A Pragmatic Approach To A Contemporary Understanding Of The Ambiguity In The Copyright Act’S Transmit Clause, Samantha Tilipman

Samantha Tilipman

The 1976 Copyright Act was a response to development of new technology and an attempt to clarify copyright law to promote further investment in the burgeoning sphere of cable systems.[1] In drafting the provisions of the new Act, Congress created the “Transmit Clause,” a key passage nestled into the definition of “to perform or display a work ‘publicly.’”[2]The ambiguity of the Transmit Clause has led the circuits to interpret it differently leading to conflicting caselaw on opposite ends of the nation. The purpose of this note is to provide the Supreme Court of the United States and ...

A Mother Goose Guide To Legal Writing, Jessica Ronay

Jessica Ronay

An original substantive poem with footnotes and explanatory paragraphs that provides examples and explanations of legal writing rules, illustrates the nuances of legal writing, and untangles the challenging legal writing concepts for students, professors, scholars, and practitioners.

Digital Commons And Ssrn: Turning Perceived Conflict Into Real Synergy, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

Presentations

Covers the history of SSRN and the development of institutional repositories, how to positively address faculty concerns about losing SSRN download statistics, statistical analysis of downloads on each platform and research behavior, and an overview of the strengths and advantages of each platform.

A Proposal To The Aba: One Required Legal Writing Course For All Six Semesters Of Law School, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

If you decide to run a marathon, but stop training after the eighth week of a sixteen-week training schedule, you will not finish. Why? Your muscles atrophied, and your stamina declined. If you stop writing after the second or third semester of law school, you will not become a good legal writer. Why? Your skills atrophied. You did not develop mental memory—just like the marathon runner did not develop muscle memory.

Why did the marathon runner stop? Maybe life got in the way, or training became too hard. But it’s the difficult moments—the grind—that separates the ...

A Promising Beginning, Jeremiah A. Ho

University of Massachusetts Law Review

When I began teaching at the University of Massachusetts in August 2012, one of my first encounters was with the newly-formed UMass Law Review. The editorial staff was wrapping up its initial preparations for publishing the inaugural volume. Now, over a year later, those nascent processes have since been refined; the inaugural year is over. We are excited to say that the UMass Law Review enters its sophomore year with this current issue, affectionately dubbed “9:1”.

Amicus Briefs: Friends Of Lawyering Skills Pedagogy, Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing - What's Next? Real-World, Persuasion Pedagogy From Day One, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Law schools have an ethical duty to train effective legal writers who understand that the skills acquired in law school are intended to serve something greater than themselves — the bench, bar, and broader community. Training good writers — and good people — can happen by creating a writing curriculum that focuses on persuasive advocacy, public service, and honest legal representation from the first semester to the last. This change will be a challenge to legal writing professors everywhere, but with proper institutional support and collaboration, law schools can prepare their students for a profession “that depends on flawless writing, logical reasoning, and ...

Free & Low-Cost Legal Research Options - Presentation Outline, Lee A. Ryan

Lee A. Ryan

This presentation, created for a first-year Legal Research, Writing & Analysis class, discusses and compares free primary law research sites for United States federal and state law. It also discusses, describes and compares several low-cost legal research options. The accompanying slides are also available on this site.

Free & Low-Cost Legal Research Options - Slides, Lee A. Ryan

Lee A. Ryan

These slides accompany the presentation on free and low-cost research options created for a guest presentation in a first-year Legal Research, Writing & Analysis class. These slides are meant to be used with the outline of the presentation, which are also available on this site.

A Dead Link Of A Final Resting Place: Link Rot In Legal Citations, Nick Szydlowski

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

A webpage’s URL is often referred to as its address, but frequently it is more like a short-term sublet than a permanent home. This article discusses the problem of link rot in legal citations and advocates for law reviews to adopt DOIs and Perma as complementary solutions.

E-Mail Netiquette For Lawyers, Gerald Lebovits

Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

What Books On Law Should Be, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

I have thought it might be useful to our profession, and appropriate to a foreword to a collection of reviews of newly published books on law, to set forth some ideas on how books can best serve members of the different branches of the legal profession — specifically judges, practicing lawyers, law students, and academic lawyers — plus persons outside the legal profession who are interested in law. I am not interested in which already published books should be retained and which discarded, but in what type of book about law should be written from this day forward. I will mention a ...

How Flipping The Classroom Made My Students Better Legal Researchers And Me A Better Teacher, Alex Berrio Matamoros

Alex Berrio Matamoros

No abstract provided.

Let’S Get Together, Yeah Yeah Yeah! : Teaching Students Purposefully Placement Of Individual Sentences To Maximize Paragraph Cohesion., Leslie P. Culver

Leslie P Culver

ABSTRACT

While meeting with students to discuss their memos, a consistent pattern arose regarding sentence placement in their writing. As a primary example, in rule paragraphs, students were including rule information relevant to the legal issue, yet in no particular order, and sentence rearrangement was necessary to make the information more cohesive. The result was surprising to both professor and student. The student was amazed at how rearranging sentences (with minor edits to the word choice) made such a difference in the substantive flow and impact of the overall paragraph; and as a professor, I was amazed that the student ...