Law Commons^™

Creac In The Real World, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article will examine the extent to which common legal writing paradigms such as CREAC are used by attorneys in the "real world" of practice when writing on the kinds of issues law students may encounter in the first-year legal writing classroom. To that end, it will focus on the analysis of two factor-based criminal law issues: whether a defendant was in custody and whether a defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In focusing on "first-year" issues, the article seeks not to examine whether organizational paradigms are used at all in legal analysis, but to discover whether and how …

Effective Writing Is Organized Writing, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Popular Media

Effective legal writers organize their analysis with the reader in mind. This article focuses on two common techniques used in creating organized writing strong topic sentences and appropriate transitions.

Outcomes In The Balance: The Crisis In Legal Education As Catalyst For Change, Beau Steenken

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this article, the author discusses how changes in the legal education market can force legal research teachers to focus their energies on meaningful assessment.

The Open Access Advantage For American Law Reviews, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne

James M. Donovan

Open access legal scholarship generates a prolific discussion, but few empirical details have been available to describe the scholarly impact of providing unrestricted access to law review articles. The present project fills this gap with specific findings on what authors and law reviews can expect.

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a …

The Open Access Advantage For American Law Reviews, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Open access legal scholarship generates a prolific discussion, but few empirical details have been available to describe the scholarly impact of providing unrestricted access to law review articles. The present project fills this gap with specific findings on what authors and law reviews can expect.

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a …

Law, Legitimacy, And The Maligned Adverb, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The standard rules for good writing dictate that adverbs should be avoided. They undermine the effectiveness of the text and detract from the author’s point. Students and teachers of legal writing have incorporated this general rule, leading them not only to avoid adverbs in their own writings, but also to overlook them in the writings of others, including statutes and cases. However, as Michael Oakeshott has argued, law happens not in the rules but in the adverbs. To become desensitized to the power of adverbs, or to presume that they are weak and unnecessary, leads the reader not only to …

Law, Legitimacy, And The Maligned Adverb, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

The standard rules for good writing dictate that adverbs should be avoided. They undermine the effectiveness of the text and detract from the author’s point. Lawyers have incorporated this general rule, leading them not only to avoid adverbs in their own writings but also to overlook them in the writings of others, including statutes. However, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott has argued, law happens not in the rules but in the adverbs. Through its adverbs the law allows moral space for the citizen to consent to the social order, rather than merely conforming to an imposed command to comply. To become …