Law Commons^™

Jupiter As Everyman: Michael Reisman And The Scholar As Teacher, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These are Chief Judge Baker’s remarks reflecting on the scholarship of Professor Michael Reisman in the field of national security law. Chief Judge Baker comments that Professor Reisman is a prolific writer and Scholar-Teacher dedicated to the study of force, minimization of suffering, and the advancement of human dignity and the law. He discusses how Professor Reisman’s work is distinctive in that it identifies and incorporates the critical influence of process, both formal and informal, in decisionmaking, which sometimes overshadows substance.

A Reply To Pierre, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, the author responds to Pierre Schlag's statement that legal scholarship is dead and that live scholarship, by contrast to the stuff we produce, aims for truths that are both important and hard to uncover—the latter is what requires discipline, and the former distinguishes scholarship from ordinary observation. The “life” in lively scholarship lies partly in the quest but also in the substantial payoff: growth, when we have been convinced of something important and previously unknown; change, when we see the world differently because of it; restoration, when old truths are revalidated; breath itself, when new insights pry …

From Snail Mail To E-Mail: The Traditional Legal Memorandum In The Twenty-First Century, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Traditional legal memoranda have been used to teach objective analysis since the inception of legal writing programs in the 1970's. The continued use of these memoranda in the legal writing classroom leads law students to believe that traditional memoranda are still the primary form of communication between attorney and client. A 2006 survey of Georgetown University Law Center graduates, however, suggests that the traditional legal memorandum is all but dead in law practice. Seventy-five percent of the graduates surveyed said they write no more than three traditional memoranda per year. Instead, these graduates are more likely to communicate with clients …

Robert L. Oakley: In Memoriam, James V. Feinerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In January 1968, the New York Times Magazine printed a speech prepared by George F. Kennan for the dedication of a new library at Swarthmore College under the title "Rebels Without a Program." The response from students and teachers on the campuses was so great that a book was prepared, titled "Democracy and the Student Left." Among the student respondents was the young Bob Oakley.

Speech, Silence, And Ethical Lives In The Law, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As his many appreciative readers know, James Boyd White brought his learning to bear on the relation between ethical living and ethical speaking, and particularly as it pertains to how we live and speak in law. His prodigious writing, teaching, and speaking career, as far as I can tell, was motivated by a singular, passionate belief: that the human capacity for language can and should serve as a bridge from mind to mind and spirit to spirit, so that we might cohabit the earth not only peaceably, but with the pleasures and grace of each other's company. Language, White taught, …

Author's Response, John H. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is a privilege for me to have received the attention to my latest book of such a trio of expertise and scholarly balanced policy perspectives from three different disciplines : economics, law, and diplomacy. It is also a privilege and honor for me to receive from each of these three sometimes divergent disciplines a general overall recognition of what I sought to accomplish in this book. I congratulate the reviewers. The book has an intricate logical structure but struggles with huge amounts of empirical information, in a purposefully short work. All three authors have recognized these features, and seem …

Caveat Blogger: Blogging And The Flight From Scholarship, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These comments were delivered to the “Symposium on Bloggership” held at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006. Professor Randy Barnett discusses the pros and cons of blogging by legal scholars.

Philosophy V. Rhetoric In Legal Education: Understanding The Schism Between Doctrinal And Legal Writing Faculty, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that although legal writing faculty know that what they teach is absolutely essential to their students' success, yet it continues to be grossly, even embarrassingly, undervalued in legal education. Doctrinal legal faculty perpetuate the view that legal education is a philosophical endeavor that focuses on the truth about the nature of law and, in the twenty-first century, on the law's ability to serve justice in a multicultural America. Because of their political power, however, doctrinal faculty are able to preserve the task of truth finding for themselves. Since the nature of truth is independent of its practical …

Download It While It's Hot: Open Access And Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article analyzes the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today's world of peer reviews to tomorrow's world of open access legal blogs. This shift is occurring in three dimensions. First, legal scholarship is moving from the long form (treatises and law review articles) to the short form (very short articles, blog posts, and online collaborations). Second, a regime of exclusive rights is giving way to a regime of open access. Third, intermediaries (law school editorial boards, peer-reviewed journals) are being supplemented by disintermediated forms (papers on the Internet, blogs). Blogs and internet conversations …

Blogging And The Transformation Of Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship--that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces--the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. …

Aristotle’S Tried And True Recipe For Argument Casserole, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I thoroughly enjoyed John Schunk’s article— “What Can Legal Writing Students Learn from Watching Emeril Live?”—in the Winter 2006 issue. We are big Emeril fans in our family, and we too have heard him distinguish the art of baking casseroles from the art of baking cakes. Baking a casserole is more art than science, because although there are basic ingredients, a creative cook can vary the recipe to please a variety of palettes. Baking a cake, on the other hand, is more science than art, because if the cook eliminates a necessary egg or adds too much baking powder, the …

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

Why Print And Electronic Resources Are Essential To The Academic Law Library, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libraries have supported multiple formats for decades, from paper and microforms to audiovisual tapes and CDs. However, the newest medium, digital transmission, has presented a wider scope of challenges and caused library patrons to question the established and recognized multiformat library. Within the many questions posed, two distinct ones echo repeatedly. The first doubts the need to sustain print in an increasingly digital world, and the second warns of the dangers of relying on a still-developing technology. This article examines both of these positions and concludes that abandoning either format would translate into a failure of service to patrons, both …

Academics And The Federal Circuit: Is There A Gulf And How Do We Bridge It?, John R. Thomas

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Many of the great research universities of the United States enjoy a close relationship with innovators. Names like Carnegie, Cornell, Hopkins, Stanford, and Vanderbilt bring to mind not so much these men, but the academic institutions that they founded. The mention of other research institutions, such as the Universities of Chicago and Virginia, allows us to recall entrepreneurial founders such as Rockefeller and Jefferson. It is appropriate then, to consider how university research - and in particular, the work product of the law schools - is faring before that court whose rulings most directly impact American innovation policy.

Book Review Of Mark E. Wojcik, Illinois Legal Research (2003), Jennifer Locke Davitt

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Designed as a "teaching tool rather than a bibliographic compilation of state legal research sources" (p.xviii), "Illinois Legal Research" provides practical instruction primarily to law students. It can also serve as a ready reference tool for practitioners and others interested in researching laws specific to Illinois.

Mark Wojcik, associate professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, begins with a quick review of basic legal research methods and gives tips for developing effective and efficient research skills. He transitions into in-depth explanations of Illinois law, covering topics such as constitutions, judicial decisions, statutes and ordinances, administrative law, …

Rethinking Crime Legislation: History And Harshness, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is a truth about the criminal law that scholars evade as much as they criticize: the criminal law is produced by legislators (rather than the experts). The author states she does not know of any way to make law in a democracy other than through the voters' representatives. And, yet, it is the standard pose of the criminal law scholar to denigrate legislatures and politicians as vindictive, hysterical, or stupid. All of these things may be true but name-calling is a poor substitute for analysis. As in constitutional law, so too in criminal law, it is time to put …

Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1933, one of the leading theorists of the criminal law, Jerome Michael, wrote openly of the criminal law "as an instrument of the state." Today, criminal law is largely allergic to claims of political theory; commentators obsess about theories of deterrence and retribution, and the technical details of model codes and sentencing grids, but rarely speak of institutional effects or political commitments. In this article, the author aims to change that emphasis and to examine the criminal law as a tool for governance. Her approach is explicitly constructive: it accepts the criminal law that we have, places it in …

Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Jake, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Jake and I were professional colleagues and friends for more than twenty years, but it was in the last fifteen years that we worked closely together, bridging the supposed divide between political science and international law. Sometimes we worked together in the American Society of International Law, other times in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), or in the Human Dimensions of Global Change program. Most often, we worked together as scholars in interdisciplinary research.

Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric To Validate Legal Reasoning, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the inception of their careers, most lawyers have little or no background in classical rhetoric. Many law students enter law school thinking that they will receive formal training in either logic or rhetoric, but very few law schools even teach classes in these subjects. In the absence of any formal training, most lawyers learn to write persuasively by imitating “good” legal writing. The consequence for the legal profession is an abundance of legal writing that is not grounded conceptually in the rhetorical tradition from which it is derived. The principal problem with legal writing is not that lawyers cannot …

The Inside Scoop: What Federal Judges Really Think About The Way Lawyers Write, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A recent survey indicates that what troubles federal judges most is not what lawyers say but what they fail to say when writing briefs. Although lawyers do a good job articulating legal issues and citing controlling, relevant legal authority, they are not doing enough with the law itself. Only fifty-six percent of the judges surveyed said that lawyers “always” or “usually” make their client’s best arguments. Fifty-eight percent of the judges rated the quality of the legal analysis as just “good,” as opposed to “excellent” or “very good.” The problem seems to be that briefs lack rigorous analysis, and the …

A Voice Of Reason: The Products Liability Scholarship Of Gary T. Schwartz, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Of my many fond personal memories of Gary Schwartz, the one that stands out most vividly summons from the mists of time an evening in June 1983 at Boston's Fenway Park. It was my last visit to a childhood haunt where I had seen my first professional baseball game in 1941, an occasion that marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for the national pastime. Settled into an excellent seat that faced the storied left-field wall (and brought to mind visions of the large advertisements that covered its surface before it became known as the "Green Monster”,), I began to …

Travaux Preparatoires And United Nations Treaties Or Conventions: Using The Web Wisely, Marylin J. Raisch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While it is possible to find individual recent documentation relating to the drafting of treaties by searching the Internet via the popular search engines, the results may not always be as comprehensive as the conscientious legal practitioner or scholar might wish. And what of the less well-known multilateral conventions? Alas, it is not only the obscure or bilateral treaties that can be hard to interpret or locate. Travaux for larger conventions may be a challenge as well. An ounce of caution and a larger dose of background knowledge can save the generalist and the specialist librarian, respectively, from the pitfalls …

Legal Scholarship As A Vocation, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law professors occupy a twin role as scholars and (most of them, at any rate) as lawyers. Deborah Rhode has pointed out, in her contribution to this symposium, that the lawyer role of the professor carries with it some frequently overlooked obligations, specifically the obligation to perform pro bono service. I agree with her, and have ventured similar arguments myself. Here I will address the more purely theoretical side of the legal scholar's vocation. The text I will take for my sermon is the famous speech on the scholar's role that Max Weber delivered to a student audience eighty years …

Beyond The Moot Law Review: A Short Story With A Happy Ending, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When the author began teaching at the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1982, it was publishing at great expense a law review that few cited, few professors would write for, and few, if anyone, read. For this reason, he dubbed it a "moot law review" in that students were working hard to produce a publication that mimicked "real" law reviews-that is, law reviews that contribute to intellectual discourse and the body of legal knowledge.

The fact that you are reading this page (and others in this issue) is evidence that the Chicago-Kent Law Review is no longer a moot law …

Academic Freedom And Political Neutrality In Law Schools: An Essay On Structure And Ideology In Professional Education, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My topic for this essay is the role of institutional political neutrality in fostering a vital academic freedom within a law school. It is necessary to explain what this inquiry embraces and why it is a useful entry into our concerns. Traditionally, the political neutrality of the university has been seen as the foundation for the academic freedom of the professoriate. But the media today vibrate with complaints about "political correctness" in legal education, meaning an administrative sponsorship of certain social ideals in a manner that restricts criticism or debate.1 Also, political contention over the shape of legal education has …

Preface: Academic Freedom And Legal Education, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Preface to a collection of papers delivered at a conference on Academic Freedom and Legal Education, held at the Tulane University School of Law on April 3 and 4,1992. Speaking or writing about academic freedom propels one from current controversies toward implicit or explicit propositions about the nature and goals of legal education.

A Critical Legal Studies Perspective On Contract Law And Practice, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The critical legal studies movement is often viewed as highly theoretical, characterized by impenetrable scholarship that makes frequent reference to the work of"famous dead Europeans." Indeed, the theoretical detachment of critical legal studies from real-world concerns has led some to speculate that the methodologies of the movement are so abstract and stylized that they could be used to deny the validity of distinctions that we commonly rely upon in everyday life-even something as basic as the distinction between up and down. Given the level of abstraction at which most critical legal studies analysis occurs, one might wonder why a critical …