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Full-Text Articles in Law
The 4-1-1 On Lawyer Directories, Mary Whisner
The 4-1-1 On Lawyer Directories, Mary Whisner
Librarians' Articles
Directories listing biographical and contact information for attorneys have been a publishing mainstay for more than one hundred years. They are used for marketing, as well as historical and genealogical research. However, technology is changing the way attorneys advertise, and Ms. Whisner looks at the current state of lawyer directories and their usage.
Getting To Know Fastcase, Mary Whisner
Getting To Know Fastcase, Mary Whisner
Librarians' Articles
Librarians must learn how to use databases on a regular basis. The databases may be new, or they may be well-established ones that librarians haven’t used before. Ms. Whisner examines Fastcase, an online system that recently entered into a cooperative agreement with HeinOnline, and discovers some lessons about how she learns new databases.
Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter
Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter
Articles
Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts …
Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin
Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin
Articles
This Article attempts to use linguistics, specifically text analysis and pragmatics, to help explain how and why lawyers who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) struggle with cohesion in their U.S. legal writing. Then in light of that discussion, it offers a four-step, receptive and productive exercise to engage students in contrastive analysis of cohesive features across languages and cultures.
It begins by distinguishing coherence (top-down flow related to rhetorical preferences and organization of content and argument) from cohesion (bottom-up flow related to the surface features that exhibit connections between clauses). As background, it explores the role of cohesion in …