Law Commons^™

The Renaissance Road: Redesigning The Legal Writing Instructional Model, Johanna K.P. Dennis

Publications

The status quo in the required legal writing curriculum of legal education is a two-semester program in the first year of law school. However, this program requires that students simultaneously rethink and develop their legal writing skills while being taught an entirely new language - the language of the law. This program expects mastery from all students without accounting for their necessary rebirths or providing multiple opportunities for depth on various assignments. By contrast, institutions can rethink how they educate future lawyers and transition to a three-semester program, which allows more opportunity for horizontal growth and vertical advancement beyond the …

Ensuring A Multicultural Educational Experience In Legal Education: Start With The Legal Writing Classroom, Johanna K.P. Dennis

Publications

This Article discusses the two-fold nature of multicultural education- educating on multicultural topics and educating multicultural students. By examining eight different law schools, the Author discusses current efforts in each law school that impact the educational experience, the shortfalls in these efforts, the need for first-year integration of multicultural topics, and how an educator in the legal academy can ensure that her students receive a well-rounded multicultural educational experience. In particular, the Article addresses multicultural education through the lens of a legal writing professor, whose role entails instructing students on predictive and persuasive writing over the course of the first …

Colorado Legal Ethics: Guide To Resources, Robert M. Linz

Publications

No abstract provided.

Telling Through Type: Typography And Narrative In Legal Briefs, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Most legal authors today self-publish, using basic word-processing software and letting the software’s default settings determine what their documents will look like when printed. As these settings are not optimized for legal texts, they do so at their peril. The default font Times New Roman, for example, as Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook warns, is "utterly inappropriate for long documents [such as] briefs."

Commentators have started urging a more deliberate approach to legal typography. Their suggestions, however, have been content-neutral, intended for all legal texts and focused on goals such as legibility and readability.

Typography, however, has much greater potential. The …

The Relevance Of Results Generated By Human Indexing And Computer Algorithms: A Study Of West's Headnotes And Key Numbers And Lexisnexis's Headnotes And Topics, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

This article begins the investigation into the different ways results are generated in West's "Custom Digest" and in LexisNexis's "Search by Topic or Headnote" and by KeyCite and Shepard's. The author took ten pairs of matching headnotes from important federal and California cases and reviewed the results sets generated by each classification and citator system for relevance. The differences in the results sets for classification systems and for citator systems raise interesting issues about the efficiency and comprehensiveness of any one system, and the need to adjust research strategies accordingly

Quality Of Academic Law Library Online Catalogs And Its Effect On Information Retrieval, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

Quality in online catalogs is generally presumed to be high. Ms. Briscoe examined a number of online catalog entries and documented the accuracy of selected bibliographic records. After finding a high level of errors, she surveyed reference librarians to determine if they believed that these errors would affect their ability to answer reference questions.