Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Unbelievable: How Narrative Can Help Vulnerable Narrators Overcome Perceived Unreliability In The Legal System, Cathren Page

Articles

This article examines how advocates can champion vulnerable narrators’ truths. First, advocates must prime the audience by educating the audience about the ways the vulnerability manifests; this process helps to allay credibility questions. Second, advocates must reframe seemingly untrustworthy behavior by showing how the behavior is consistent with someone in the vulnerable narrator’s situation. Third, advocates must create what fiction writers call verisimilitude—a sense of reality—by including concrete details that logically fit together in the legal narrative. Finally, advocates must label the tactics commonly used to discredit vulnerable narrators so that the audience can see those tactics for what they …

Table Of Contents And Masthead, Maribeth Beyer

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Formatting Legal Documents With Microsoft Word, Cardozo Law Library

Flyers 2022-2023

No abstract provided.

A Bibliography Of Faculty Scholarship, Kathryn J. Dufour Law Library

Scholarly Articles

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, Maribeth Beyer

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Luck Of The Draw Iii: Using Ai To Examine Decision‐Making In Federal Court Stays Of Removal, Sean Rehaag

All Papers

This article examines decision‐making in Federal Court of Canada immigration law applications for stays of removal, focusing on how the rates at which stays are granted depend on which judge decides the case. The article deploys a form of computational natural language processing, using a large‐language model machine learning process (GPT‐3) to extract data from online Federal Court dockets. The article reviews patterns in outcomes in thousands of stay of removal applications identified through this process and reveals a wide range in stay grant rates across many judges. The article argues that the Federal Court should take measures to encourage …

Defeasible Semantics For L4, Guido Governatori, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Centre for Computational Law

The importance of defeasibility for legal reasoning has been investigated for a long time (see among other [10, 3, 11]). This notion mostly concerns the issue that textual provisions of (legal) norms typically provide prima facie conditions for their applicability, but to understand a norm in full, we have to evaluate the norms in the context in which the norm is used and to see if other norms prevent it either to apply or to be effective. In other words, when evaluating norms, we must account for possible (prima facie) conflicts and exceptions. Indeed, in general, norms first provide the …

Build A Career That Aligns With Your Passions, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

When I was wrapping up my final semester of law school, I was fretting about what I would do next. The job market for new attorneys had tanked, less than half of my classmates had job offers lined up, I had no connections of my own that I could work, and worse, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Expressing my anxiety to our school’s Westlaw rep at the time, she asked me to reflect on my favorite parts of law school. That was easy: I loved any class where I could write a …

Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

Secondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.

Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of …

Editing, Vehicles In The Park, And The Virtue Of Clarity, Patrick Barry

Articles

What is the optimal amount of advocacy?

My law students and I face that question all the time. We face it when we’re drafting motions. We face it when we’re proposing changes to contracts. We even face it when putting together key emails, text messages, and social-media posts.

In all these situations and many more, we don’t want to oversell our arguments and ideas — but we don’t want to undersell them either. Instead, we hope to hit that perfect sweet spot known as “persuasion.”

We don’t always succeed, but one thing that has significantly increased our effectiveness is the …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Nicholson W. Price, Keerthana Nunna, Jonathan Tietz

Articles

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgments paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those factors. The landscape …

The Persistent Treatise, Dana Neacsu, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

The thesis of our paper is that the legal treatise, despite some decline in citation, persists as part of the cognitive authority of our legal system. We support this claim with promising empirical data and qualitative analysis, which if not definitively proving our thesis, certainly supports its plausibility. Besides quantitative research supporting the persistence of the treatise, the terms, treatise, techné and cognitive authority are defined and described in relation to each other as part of our paper to illuminate the treatise’s significance. Treatise has a well-delineated definition in the article resulting from our rules for selection …

Persistent Treatise - Data & Charts, Paul D. Callister, Dana Neacsu

Data for Scholarly Works

The thesis of the article that will accompany this data is that the legal treatises, despite some decline in citation, persists as part of the cognitive authority of our legal system. We support this claim with promising empirical data and qualitative analysis, which if not definitively proving our thesis, certainly supports its plausibility. Besides quantitative research supporting the persistence of the treatise, the terms, treatise, techné and cognitive authority are defined and described in relation to each other as part of our paper to illuminate the treatise’s significance. Treatise has a well-delineated definition in the article resulting …

Creating Shared Understanding: Preparing Students For A Modern Client Base, Jaclyn Celebrezze, Mireille Butler

Presentations

The Legal Writing Institute hosted a series of one-day workshops at various law schools, including at CWRU, where the theme of the workshops was "Preparing Students for the Modern Practice of Law." This presentation discusses how to prepare students for a modern, globalized client base, and provides tips and tools to help create a shared understanding between clients and future practitioners.

Compliance Through Model Checking, Avishkar Mahajan, Strecker Martin, Seng Joe Watt, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Centre for Computational Law

In this short note, we describe part of a case study about Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act, which we first presented in-formally, then formally as interacting Timed Automata. From these, we derive desiderata on a language and verification framework for reasoning about compliance.

Driving-Decision Making Of Autonomous Vehicle According To Queensland Overtaking Traffic Rules, Hanif Bhuiyan, Guido Governatori, Avishkar Mahajan, Andry Rakotonirainy, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Centre for Computational Law

Making a driving decision according to traffic rules is a challenging task for improving the safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Traffic rules often contain open texture expressions and exceptions, which makes it hard for AVs to follow them. This paper introduces a Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) baseddriving decision-making methodology for AVs. We use DDL to formalize traffic rules and facilitate automated reasoning. DDL is used to effectively handle rule exceptions and resolve open texture expressions in rules. Furthermore, we supplement the information provided by the traffic rules by an ontology for AV driving behaviour and environment information. This methodology performs …

An End-To-End Pipeline From Law Text To Logical Formulas, Aarne Ranta, Inari Listenmaa, Jerrold Soh, Meng Weng (Huang Mingrong) Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We propose a pipeline for converting natural English law texts into logical formulas via a series of structural representations. Text texts are first parsed using a formal grammar derived from light-weight annotations. An intermediate representation called assembly logic is then used for logical interpretation and supports translations to different back-end logics and visualisations. The approach, while rule-based and explainable, is also robust: it can deliver useful results from day one, but allows subsequent refinements and variations.

By The Inch, It’S A Cinch: The Case For Go-Ing Slow In First-Year Legal Writing Courses, Patrick J. Long

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

American Voter Turnout: The Influence Of Education Levels On Voter Participation, Jack Thomas Bunzel-Hardie

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This study is intended to explore the relevant relationship between mistrust in government officials and voter turnout. Within a research article such as this, it is important to distinguish the dependent and independent factors from one another so as not to get them confused. This article identifies the growing sense of mistrust that many Americans feel towards their government officials as the independent factor while examining the relationship that voter turnout has with that growing fear, therefore making that the dependent variable. While this issue has been studied in the past there have been many new events taking place and …

Centering Black Women In Patent History, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Kara Swanson’s latest article is a remarkable example of legal historical scholarship that excavates stories from the past to illuminate the present. It is chock full of archival evidence and historical analysis that explains gaps and silences in the United States patent registry as evidence of marginalized inventors–particularly Black women–who should be named inventors but are not.

The article is arresting reading for anyone interested in antebellum history, intellectual property, and the intersection of racism and sexism in law. Mostly, I am grateful to Professor Swanson for doing the obviously very hard work of digging through archives, reading microfiche, …