Law Commons^™

Replicability In Empirical Legal Research, Jason Chin, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

As part of a broader methodological reform movement, scientists are increasingly interested in improving the replicability of their research. Replicability allows others to perform replications to explore potential errors and statistical issues that might call the original results into question. Little attention, however, has been paid to the state of replicability in the field of empirical legal research (ELR). Quality is especially important in this field because empirical legal researchers produce work that is regularly relied upon by courts and other legal bodies. In this review article, we summarize the current state of ELR relative to the broader movement towards …

Is Open Access Equal Access? Pacer User Fees And Public Access To Court Information, John L. Moreland

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Our country has a long history of striving for openness and transparency in government processes. In 1978, the United States Supreme Court held, “It is clear that the courts of this country recognize a general right to insect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.” Long before America’s high court recognized this common law principle, court records were historically accessible for inspection by lawyers, journalists, land title companies, credit agencies, academics, and members of the general public. These individuals were also permitted to take notes as a part of their right to inspect court documents. Having …

An Ecological And Holistic Analysis Of The Epistemic Value Of Law Libraries, Paul D. Callister, Dana Neacsu

Faculty Works

We examine the libraries' roles within the "epistemic foundation of society.” Our analysis is in response to the omission of Yale Law Dean Gerken of the role of libraries in her recent article about legal education's new focus and to remarks by AALS President Vicki Jackson that suggest an uncertain role for libraries. We have adapted holistic ecological media theory, as developed by Ronald Deibert, to reject a technologically deterministic view of libraries as having no future. We have considered the role of law libraries in the social epistemology or cognitive authority of the legal community, the role of law …

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 …

Law Students, Covid-19, And Big Feelings, Olivia R. Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Publications

It’s Fall 2021 and well . . . we’re back. Or rather – some of us are. Along with a patchwork of universities requiring vaccinations and/or masks for students comes a patchwork of modes of instruction: fully online, hybrid, fully in-person (and subject to change). Some employees have shifted to occasional work-from-home models while others are required to be in-person every day. It’s all very complicated. Honestly, right now everything is complicated. With big, complicated situations come big, complicated feelings, and our students’ feelings are certainly that: big.

Eleven Observations About Legal Writing, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This Article collects 11 observations about legal writing that I have shared with law students since I began teaching in the late 1970s.

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Noise Pollution, Patrick Barry

Law & Economics Working Papers

The authors of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment are a trio of intellectual heavy hitters: Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, constitutional law scholar Cass Sunstein, and former McKinsey consultant (and current management professor) Olivier Sibony. As prolific as they are prominent, the three of them have collectively produced over fifty books and hundreds of articles, including some of the most cited research in social science. If academic publishing ever becomes an Olympic sport, they’ll be prime medal contenders, particularly if they get to compete as a team or on a relay. Their combined coverage of law, economics, psychology, medicine, education, …

Democracy Requires Good Law Libraries – With Books, Franklin L. Runge

Library Scholarship

In this brief commentary, the author argues for the continued presence of a print collection in law libraries because (1) law libraries serve as a fail-safe for democracy, (2) inexperienced researchers achieve a greater understanding of how primary law is produced when exposed to print materials, and (3) there is still a high demand for print materials in scholarly endeavors.

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu Law Acquires Top Marine Law Journal 08-19-2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Foreword: From Personal Life To Private Law: The Jurisprudence Of John Gardner, Scott Hershovitz

Other Publications

John Gardner was a great philosopher. He was appointed as the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford when he was still quite junior in the profession. It was a big job. Ronald Dworkin held the post before Gardner, and H.L.A. Hart before him. Gardner delivered on his promise. He had wide-ranging interests. He wrote about jurisprudence, criminal law, and tort law. His pushed those fields forward—and others too. Gardner’s scholarship was incisive, creative, rigorous, generous, and witty. He had a knack for illuminating law and life too. In recent years, Gardner published two books that tackled tort law: From Personal Life …

Researching Marijuana Law, Seth Quidachay-Swan

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article provides a brief overview of the current legal framework governing the regulation of marijuana at the federal and state levels in the United States. It also provides an overview of the state of Michigan’s current regulatory framework and resources for attorneys interested in learning more about marijuana regulation.

Law Library Continuing Services Webpage, May 2021, University Of Georgia Law Library

COVID-19 Pandemic Archive

This screenshot was the final version of the Law Library's COVID-19 Continuing Services webpage. First published on Friday March 13, 2020 as we prepared for our first week of building closure at the onset of the pandemic, it was the primary location of our library's facility hours, pandemic services, and closure information through Spring 2021. This version shows the way the webpage looked on the date it was unpublished May 17, 2021.

Shakespeare In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article continues the theme of recent “Writing It Right” articles in the Journal of the Missouri Bar. These articles describe how federal and state judges today frequently accent their opinions’ substantive or procedural rulings with references to cultural markers that can resonate with the advocates, parties, and judges who comprise the opinions’ readership. The courts’ broad array of cultural references demonstrates versatility. Some of my early articles in the Journal profiled judicial opinions that referenced terminologies, rules, and traditions of baseball, football, and other sports. Together these sports’ mass audiences help define American culture.

Later my Journal articles profiled …

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

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Adopting Doi In Legal Citation: A Roadmap For The Legal Academy, Valeri Craigle

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique string of numbers, letters, and symbols used to identify web-based information assets such as articles, multimedia items, and datasets. A digital object minted with a DOI will be persistently discoverable through this identifier, as long as it lives on the Web.

DOIs are already ubiquitous in citations in the medical and scientific literature, primarily because the discovery of, access to, and linkages between the scholarship in these disciplines happens almost exclusively online. As is true with most content on the web, scholarly content in the sciences is published on multiple platforms and …

Addressing Employers' Citation Systems Confusion, Maria Comas, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spring 2021 Newsletter: The Docket, Emma Wood

Law Library Newsletter

Copy of the Spring 2021 issue of the UMass Law Library Newsletter, The Docket.

Healthy Hives: Can Replacing Hierarchies With Intergroup Teams Transform Our Profession?, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Improve Recitals And Consideration Clauses With Plain Language, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As used in a "WHEREAS" clause, the term "whereas" simply means "considering that" or "that being the case." There is no legal effect to the word "whereas." It, like many other words used in standard contract boilerplate, is left over from some long-forgotten era of legal writing when lawyers used big words and legalese to impress clients with their intelligence and to justify their bills. These times have (or at least should have) passed. Today, documents must be accessible to those who use them: in most cases the clients for whom such documents are drafted.

Ai And Legal Scholarship : Reflections On Evolution And Influences, Jonathon W. Penney

Articles & Book Chapters

Leading Legal Disruption: Artificial Intelligence and a Toolkit for Lawyers and the Law is designed to challenge lawyers with the practical implications that emerging technologies will have on delivering legal services and thinking about legal issues to navigate their digital transformation. By inviting thought leaders across the world and in different disciplines, ranging from privacy, contract law, and torts to governance and policy, this book goes beyond abstract and general philosophical observations on matters that concern practitioners. This practical approach has generated a wide range of global perspectives, which are refreshingly novel and timely for what are increasingly global issues. …

The Supreme Court's Worst Decision In Recent Years--Garcetti V. Ceballos, The Dred Scott Decision For Public Employees, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court decision of Garcetti v. Ceballos deserves its rightful place in the Court’s hall of shame. In Garcetti, the Court issued a decision that serves as a Dred Scott-type ruling for public employees, diminishing their free speech rights to an unacceptable level. The Court created a categorical rule that public employees have no free speech rights when engaged in official, job-related speech.

Under Garcetti, it does not matter how valuable an employee’s speech is, how much corruption that speech exposes, or whether the speech informs the public regarding an important issue. Instead, the five-justice majority focused …

The Unified Legal Skills Program: How One Law School Adapted To Meet The Needs Of Students Online, And How Those Adaptations May Inform Post-Pandemic Teaching, David Austin, Allison D. Cato, Amy E. Day, Liam Vavasour

Faculty Scholarship

When CWSL was forced to switch to online learning for the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked hard to follow best practices for online learning by attending online conferences and voraciously reading everything we could find to make the learning experience the best we could for our students. CWSL's Legal Skills program earned high praise in student evaluations for adapting so quickly given the difficult circumstances.

During the summer of 2020, we met as a Legal Skills team to discuss how to approach the regular school term. Specifically, we faced a larger-than-anticipated first-year class and contemplated how to remedy the sense of …

Teaching Written Advocacy In A Law Clinic Setting, Tamar Ezer

Articles

Written advocacy is a critical lawyering skill and vital component of student work in many clinics. This is certainly true in appellate advocacy and policy-based clinics, such as my own focused on human rights advocacy. Teaching written advocacy requires a deliberate and thoughtful pedagogy, just as with other aspects of clinical teaching. There is a rich literature on teaching legal writing, but only sparse discussion of its applicability in the fast-paced law clinic setting, where written products have real world consequences and need to be of high quality. This article delves into this literature and argues that written advocacy consists …

The Art Of The Matter: A Linguistic Analysis Of Public Art Policy In Confederate Monument Removal Case Law, Kristi Arth

Law Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of such tragedies as the Charleston, South Carolina mass shooting, the deadly Unite the Right Rally, and the death of George Floyd, various communities have engaged in efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces. These removal efforts frequently result in litigation focused on ownership rights, government speech, and other claims. This article asks what responsibility the judiciary and litigants have to acknowledge that Confederate monuments—for better or for worse—are creations of public art.

Whether the monuments stay or go at the end of a given lawsuit, the outcome affects the public art policy of the subject …

Self-Determination In American Discourse: The Supreme Court’S Historical Indoctrination Of Free Speech And Expression, Jarred Williams

Honors Theses

Within the American criminal legal system, it is a well-established practice to presume the innocence of those charged with criminal offenses unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a judicial framework-like approach, called a legal maxim, is utilized in order to ensure that the law is applied and interpreted in ways that legislative bodies originally intended.

The central aim of this piece in relation to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is to investigate whether the Supreme Court of the United States has utilized a specific legal maxim within cases that dispute government speech or expression regulation. …

A Review Of Grey Literature Cited By Food Loss Law And Policy Scholarship, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, state and federal programs, rules, and legislation attempt to address the social, economic, and environmental impacts of food waste. Research on the efficacy of these interventions rely on a variety of grey literature resources. Grey literature is valuable to policy research but may be overlooked because it is not published commercially and is often deemed unauthoritative. This review focuses on the use of grey literature in food waste law and policy scholarship to identify the most used sources and to determine what, if any, archiving strategies authors use. Recommendations for librarians and researchers are discussed.

Alexander Campbell King Law Library Strategic Plan, 2020-2025, University Of Georgia Law Library

Strategic Plan Documents

In 2020 a strategic plan began taking shape from UGA Law Library, in support of the emerging strategic plans from the School of Law and the University of Georgia. This five year plan states that, "The Law Library’s overall objective is to support the Law School’s strategic goals by providing exceptional instruction, research, resources, and data analytics. The Law Library supports the University and the Law School in achieving all three strategic directions for the 2020 – 2025 fiscal years."