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Articles 1 - 30 of 236
Full-Text Articles in Law
Feedback Loops: Going Negative, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: Going Negative, Patrick Barry
Articles
Aelet Fishbach is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who has studied how people seek out and process negative feedback. One of the ways she has done this is through a classroom exercise in which she divides the students into two groups: feedback givers and feedback receivers. The givers are told to pair up with a receiver and communicate the following feedback in a one-on-one setting: The person's performance s unsatisfactory; improvement is needed; and there are concrete ways they can get on the right track.
The Discipline Of Breaks: Making Time For Rest (And Revisions) In Legal Writing, Patrick Barry
The Discipline Of Breaks: Making Time For Rest (And Revisions) In Legal Writing, Patrick Barry
Other Publications
Editing your work involves the tricky business of finding the right mental distance between two versions of yourself: the version that did the drafting and the version that now needs to do the revising. Mastering that kind of cognitive division is not always an easy task.
Researching Antitrust Law, Keith Lacy
Researching Antitrust Law, Keith Lacy
Law Librarian Scholarship
Antitrust is a dynamic area of law subject to rapid change. It is highly sensitive to the attitudes of regulators and market conditions, always looking forward to how decisions made today will affect businesses and the lives of individual consumers. Current events — and passionate consumers, or fans — can incur “Swift” antitrust scrutiny, as Live Nation Entertainment discovered recently.
Yet it is inextricably linked to more abstract considerations. The term “antitrust” is itself archaic, reflecting animosity to a business practice innovated by Standard Oil in 1882. Understanding the history of antitrust actions often requires understanding something of history broadly …
Feedback Loops: More Valuable Than Money, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: More Valuable Than Money, Patrick Barry
Articles
In an essay called "Secrets of Positive Feedback,” Douglas Conant, the former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, shares a key element of the leadership style that helped him resurrect Campbell’s from financial ruin in 2001 and turn it into both a highly profitable business by the time he stepped down in 2011 and an award-winning, much more inclusive workplace: During his ten years at the helm, he wrote more than 30,000 thank-you notes to his employees and customers.
Revisiting Immigration Exceptionalism In Administrative Law, Christopher J. Walker
Revisiting Immigration Exceptionalism In Administrative Law, Christopher J. Walker
Reviews
With all the changes swirling in administrative law, one trend seems to be getting less attention than perhaps it should: the death of regulatory exceptionalism in administrative law. For decades, many regulatory fields—such as tax, intellectual property, and antitrust—viewed themselves as exceptional, such that the normal rules of the road in administrative law do not apply. The Supreme Court and the lower courts have increasingly rejected such exceptionalism in many regulatory contexts, emphasizing that the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and related administrative law doctrines are the default rules unless Congress has clearly chosen to depart from them by statute in …
Feedback Loops: Appreciators, Coaches, & Evaluators, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: Appreciators, Coaches, & Evaluators, Patrick Barry
Articles
No individual person is likely to be able to satisfy all of our feedback needs. Which is why I tell my students to assemble a “Feedback Board of Directors.” Focus in particular, I tell them, on recruiting people who can collectively provide what Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen of Harvard Law School identify as the three basic forms of feedback in their book “Thanks for the Feedback”:
Flawless First Draft In Legal Writing: A Fantasy Of The Uninitiated, Patrick Barry
Flawless First Draft In Legal Writing: A Fantasy Of The Uninitiated, Patrick Barry
Other Publications
I recently received an email from a former student (now a public interest lawyer) who had just finished a major writing project. She wanted to thank me for introducing her to the psychologically liberating concept of “shitty first drafts.” Without it, she said, she probably would have never hit her deadline.
Outsourcing Agency Rulemaking, Christopher J. Walker
Outsourcing Agency Rulemaking, Christopher J. Walker
Reviews
When it comes to understanding the political dynamics of agency rulemaking, the place to start is Rachel Potter’s book Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy, about which the Yale Journal on Regulation published a blog symposium in 2019. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, Potter explores how agency officials—both career civil servants and political appointees—play a role in the rulemaking process and leverage procedural rules to help advance their preferred policy outcomes.
Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James
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 …
Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T, Patrick Barry
Articles
The Keep/Cut Framework we learned about back in the December 2022 Feedback Loops column is, admittedly, a bit of a blunt feedback instrument. When the only feedback you can give is “Keep” or “Cut,” there’s not a ton of room for nuance or gradation. Your comments are restricted to either endorsing what already exists or pushing for something to be removed. hat’s a pretty limited menu.
So in both this column and in the June 2023 column, we’re going to learn about a feedback framework that creates opportunities for a greater range of opinions and recommendations: “E-D-I-T.”
Résumé Review: Breadth And Depth, Patrick Barry
Résumé Review: Breadth And Depth, Patrick Barry
Articles
Nobody is born knowing how to craft an effective résumé. But because the document can play a major role in a young lawyer’s career, I often talk with law students and new attorneys about how they might revise the versions they send out to potential employers. I usually frame my advice by telling them about a concept that can give their resumes a helpful organizing structure: being “T-shaped.”
Preface To Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: Jalwd, Margaret C. Hannon, Jessica Wherry
Preface To Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: Jalwd, Margaret C. Hannon, Jessica Wherry
Other Publications
We celebrate the Twentieth Volume of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD! This volume reveals and discusses opportunities for growth and new frontiers in the field of legal communication. ChatGPT makes its first impact on the journal with former Editor-in-Chief Ian Gallacher's essay, and we invited ChatGPT to help with the preface. ChatGPT's response to "write a preface for a journal volume with a theme of opportunities for growth and new frontiers in the field of legal communication" was a bit over the top (which could have been tempered with a revised prompt).
Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry
Articles
In the "Feedback Loops" column back in March, we introduced the "E-D-I-T" framework:
- Find something to Eliminate
- Find something to Decrease
- Find something to Increase
- Find something to Try
This new column will discuss each category more in depth.
Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Nicholson W. Price, Keerthana Nunna, Jonathan Tietz
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 …
Editing, Vehicles In The Park, And The Virtue Of Clarity, Patrick Barry
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 …
Non-Lawyer Judges In Devalued Courts, Maureen Carroll
Non-Lawyer Judges In Devalued Courts, Maureen Carroll
Reviews
Recent legal scholarship has shed needed light on the vast universe of litigation that occurs without lawyers. Large majorities of civil litigants lack representation, even in weighty matters such as eviction and termination of parental rights, raising a host of issues worthy of scholarly attention. For example, one recent article has examined racial and gendered effects of the lack of constitutionally guaranteed counsel in civil matters, and another has shown that judges tend not to reduce the complexity of the proceedings for the benefit of unrepresented parties. In Judging Without a J.D., Sara Greene and Kristen Renberg add an important …
Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz
Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz
Law & Economics Working Papers
A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is 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. Acknowledgements 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 …
Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon
Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon
Articles
Great legal writing is about more than mechanics. But careful attention to legal writing mechanics is nevertheless critical for effective, clear, and persuasive writing. Proper grammar, usage, and correct punctuation makes analysis clearer and therefore more effective. It also shows the reader that the writer has paid close attention to detail, which makes the reader more likely to find the writer credible. Relatedly, communicating in plain language is critical to making sure that “readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” And proper citation—or even better, stylish citation—helps the reader easily understand what …
Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry
Articles
I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?
Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky
Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky
Articles
I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …
Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry
Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry
Articles
Good writing, I often tell my students, is “anticipating the edits of your boss.” I then clarify that the definition of “boss” in that statement is intentionally expansive. A supervisor at work can count. A teacher in school can count. So can a valued customer or client. he key is to start thinking about two things: 1) the actual people who are going to review your writing; and 2) the likely changes they’ll make to it. By implementing those changes yourself— before the document ever hits your boss’s desk or inbox—you can save them a lot of time and cognitive …
Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown
Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown
Law Librarian Scholarship
Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …
Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins
Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins
Other Publications
The overarching theme of Volume 19 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD is how legal communication shapes the law, and how doers of legal writing can use their resources to make it better. The volume begins with a fascinating article from Aaron Kirschenfeld and Alexa Chew, “Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts.” In their article, Professors Kirschenfeld and Chew shed light on whether the switch from print research to digital research has changed the way that law students and lawyers conduct research. To do so, the article uses the “citation stickiness” metric, which analyzes whether …
Investigative Advocacy: The Mechanics Of Muckraking, Patrick Barry
Investigative Advocacy: The Mechanics Of Muckraking, Patrick Barry
Articles
This essay argues that drafting a complaint is a form of investigative advocacy and that the best of them uphold the tradition of muckraking journalism.
Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak
Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak
Other Publications
It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …
Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry
Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry
Articles
In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.
Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry
Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry
Articles
Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.
Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …
Researching Administrative Law, Keith Lacy
Researching Administrative Law, Keith Lacy
Law Librarian Scholarship
Administrative law is a broad subject area concerning the laws and procedures governing administrative agencies. It also encompasses the substantive law produced by those agencies — most commonly in the form of regulations (rules) or agency decisions. This article highlights a few major resources for researching administrative law in the United States.
Editing And Interleaving, Patrick Barry
Editing And Interleaving, Patrick Barry
Articles
This essay suggests that a powerful learning strategy called "interleaving"--which involves strategically switching between cognitive tasks--is being underused. It can do more than make study sessions more productive; it can also make editing sessions more productive.
A Gendered Right To Counsel?, Maureen Carroll
A Gendered Right To Counsel?, Maureen Carroll
Reviews
The civil and criminal justice systems are built on an adversarial model, but only in the criminal sphere does the defendant possess a constitutional right to representation at public expense. As a result, while representation is the default in criminal cases, more than three quarters of civil cases involve an unrepresented party.That disconnect flows from the Supreme Court’s decisions in Gideon v. Wainwright and Lassiter v. Department of Social Services. Gideon held that the Constitution guarantees a right to counsel for a defendant facing imprisonment for a criminal offense, regardless of the nature of the crime or the length of …