Law Commons^™

Applying Motivation Theory To Improve 1ls' Motivation, Self-Efficacy, And Skill Mastery, Nathan A. Preuss

Scholarly Works

This article discusses how understanding two motivation and learning theories- expectancy-value and attribution-can help instructors to improve first-year law students' motivation, self-efficacy, and mastery of the knowledge and skills needed for success in law school as well as in their future careers

Changemakers: The Line Between Talent And Desire, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

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 …

Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea For Adopting Doi, Valeri Craigle, Aaron Retteen, Benjamin Keele

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

As librarians, we do a fair amount of research online for ourselves and the faculty and students we serve. As researchers, we know that there is nothing more frustrating than encountering a dead link to a much-needed article, particularly when there are deadlines to meet. Dead links (link/ reference rot) can be a particularly frequent occurrence for law review articles because the law review societies that publish them have not yet adopted standards for preserving online access to them, particularly the adoption of a standard for implementing persistent URLs.

This Practical Insight is a plea to law reviews and law …

“If Rules They Can Be Called”, Amy J. Griffin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Who gets to decide what counts as law? The weight of authority in the U.S. legal system is governed almost entirely by unwritten rules—social norms that establish which sources have weight (and how much weight they have). In 2016, Bryan A. Garner and twelve judges published a treatise essentially codifying unwritten rules related to the operation of precedent. That book, The Law of Judicial Precedent, has itself become a source of authority (on legal authority), cited by judges across jurisdictions. In this essay, I question whether the judicial norms governing the operation of precedent are appropriately presented as definitive blackletter …

7 Everyday Useful Westlaw Tips. Plus, Bonus Trick List!, Aamir S. Abdullah

Publications

No abstract provided.

Liberty And Justice For All?: A Pathfinder On The Use Of Lyrics As Evidence In Civil And Criminal Trial, Stephanie Washington

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Against The Wind: James Boyd White And The Struggle To Keep Law Alive, Todd M. Stafford

Publications

No abstract provided.

Westlaw’S Key Number System, Aamir S. Abdullah

Publications

No abstract provided.

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.

Toward A Fair And Sustainable Corporate Governance System: Reflections On Leo Strine, Jr.'S Writing On Institutional Investors, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to contribute to this Festschrift for my friend, mentor, and co-author, Leo Strine, Jr. It is also a pleasure to revisit his vast body of work and to re-experience the breadth and depth of his scholarship, as well as reflect on his unparalleled influence on the development of corporate law that he brought about while presiding over its most influential courts for twenty-one years.

In thinking about this essay, I recalled a conversation that I had with “CJS” when I was serving as his law clerk. In this conversation, he decried (with James Taylor blasting in …

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 …

Small Teaching, Big Impact, Ashley B. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

James M. Lang’s thesis in Small Teaching is simple: There are small things that educators can do to improve learning outcomes in their classrooms. Lang asserts that these “small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” are easy for teachers to incorporate and supported by research on learning. Lang is well steeped in pedagogical best practices—he is the former director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, and he regularly writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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

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 …

Law Library Blog (December 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Lawyering 'Twisties': Naming And Untangling Performance Anxiety, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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.

Arkansas Practice Materials: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, Jessie Wallace Burchfield, Melissa Serfass

Faculty Scholarship

Whether you are a legal professional or a novice legal researcher, this annotated bibliography of Arkansas practice materials provides current and relevant state-specific information about available resources. The bibliography integrates online and print resources, grouped by topic rather than format. Each source is annotated with helpful information.

Detailed information about primary legal materials such as court cases, statutes and administrative regulations is included. Information about secondary sources such as treatises, practice manuals, forms, and websites, is also covered.

It is organized in five main sections: Primary Materials, Government Resources, State Specific Resources, General Jurisprudence, and Practice Materials by Topic.

2020-2021 Annual Report, Caroline L. Osborne

Law Library Annual Reports and Assessments

No abstract provided.

The Dream Of Property Professors, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Michael Heller and James Salzman's new book, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, is a dream come true for property professors.

I suspect that many of us have moments when we think to ourselves, "wow, this stuff is really interesting," imagining that property law could somehow be of general interest. Too often that dream is killed when the eyes of non-lawyers, including family members, start to glaze over when they hear words like rule against perpetuities or trademark. Heller and Salzman have succeeded in making the stories property professors tell the stuff of a bestseller. They …

Dare To Dream: How Would You Teach 1ls Legal Research With No Restrictions?, Olivia R. Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Publications

When I started in my current role as an instructional librarian, I was given space to make the changes I thought necessary to improve an already-changing legal research program. I’ve made changes – some small, some more major – in both the 1L and upper-level research curriculum, but there is more to do. In particular, I’m not entirely satisfied with how we teach legal research to 1Ls.

Integrating Doctrine And Diversity Speaker Series: Making Space, Taking Space 11-16-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

"Yogi-Isms" In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

The versatility of Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra, a native of St. Louis,5 appears unparalleled in the annals of professional sports. His stellar on-the-field performance earned him election to the Hall of Fame in 1972, and his vast collection of off-the-field sayings earned him a secure place in American folklore. Some Yogi-isms are cited and quoted in federal and state judicial opinions. Topping the judicial ledger is “It’s déjà vu all over again,” which appears in Shurtleff and a few dozen other decisions.

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 Human Being Wrote This Law Review Article: Gpt-3 And The Practice Of Law, Amy B. Cyphert

Law Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence tools can now “write” in such a sophisticated manner that they fool people into believing that a human wrote the text. None are better at writing than GPT-3, released in 2020 for beta testing and coming to commercial markets in 2021. GPT-3 was trained on a massive dataset that included scrapes of language from sources ranging from the NYTimes to Reddit boards. And so, it comes as no surprise that researchers have already documented incidences of bias where GPT-3 spews toxic language. But because GPT-3 is so good at “writing,” and can be easily trained to write in …

Three Suggestions To Promote New Scholarship From An Outgoing Editor-In-Chief, Christian I. Bale

Duke Law Journal Online

No abstract provided.

The Silver Lining Of The Covid-19 Pandemic: Building Effective - And Enduring - International Legal Education Opportunities, Diane Penneys Edelman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Debunking The Efficacy Of Standard Contract Boilerplate: Part Iii, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

There are several things wrong with this paragraph. First, the heading "Knowledge of Residence" is underinclusive, as the paragraph concerns more than where each party lives. A more inclusive and effective heading would be "Knowledge of Contact Information." Second, the introductory phrase is ambiguous, as one could read "for so long as the minor children are less than eighteen years of age" as requiring the parties to exchange information only until one of the parties' children turns 18. Moreover, "eighteen years of age" is archaic and clunky legalese. Keep it simple, solicitors: "eighteen" or "age eighteen" would suffice. Applying these …