Law Commons^™

Generative Ai And Finding The Law, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Abstract

Legal information science requires, among other things, principles and theories. The article states six principles or considerations that any discussion of generative AI large language models and their role in finding the law must include. The article concludes that law librarianship will increasingly become legal information science and require new paradigms. In addition to the six principles, the article applies ecological holistic media theory to understand the relationship of the legal community’s cognitive authority, institutions, techné (technology, medium and method), geopolitical factors, and the past and future to understand the changes in this information milieu. The article also explains …

Strategies For Equitable Access: A Discussion On Public School District Enrollment, Lisa A. Gooden

Presentations and Speeches

Presentation prepared for the Equity Oriented Strategic Planning Committee for Kansas City Public Schools. Discussion includes an analysis of current practices and outcomes, potential future goals, and annotated examples of enrollment strategies employed by school districts in the United States designed to foster equitable access.

Strategies For Equitable Access: Identifying Benefits And Strategies For Creating Integrated Public Schools, Annotated Examples Of Current School District Enrollment Practices, And Resources For Further Exploration, Lisa A. Gooden

Faculty Works

Prepared for the Equity Oriented Strategic Planning Committee for Kansas City Public Schools. Includes a summary of the benefits of integrated schools, strategies for creating equitable schools, annotated examples of current practices employed by public school districts in the United States to foster equitable access to education, and list of links to additional resources for further reading.

Law, Artificial Intelligence, And Natural Language Processing: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Search Results, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Renowned legal educator Roscoe Pound stated, “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.” Yet, as Susan Nevelow Mart has demonstrated in a seminal article that the different online research services (Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel and Casetext) produce significantly different results when researching case law. Furthermore, a recent study of 325 federal courts of appeals decisions, revealed that only 16% of the cases cited in appellate briefs make it into the courts’ opinions. This does not exactly inspire confidence in legal research or its tools to maintain stability of the law. As Robert Berring foresaw, …

Using Infographics To Report Research Results, Ayyoub Ajmi

Faculty Works

This article uses infographics to share how cross-departmental collaboration and open communication between librarians and IT professionals can lead to successful implementation of technology initiatives in libraries, and how shared services bring access to specialized personnel whom most law libraries and law schools wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Hacked! Lessons Learned From An Url Injection, Ayyoub Ajmi

Faculty Works

Starting in the year 2014, people've seen an increasing number of cyber attacks targeting all sorts of organizations. These have cost the US economy billions of dollars and exposed the private data of millions of individuals. While most of them are designed to steal trade secrets, credit card information, or even celebrities' personal information, there are still other attacks targeting individuals and small organizations with the sole goal of spreading malware and promoting shady businesses. This is URL injection. The big lesson they learned from this experience is the need for a healthy cross-departmental collaboration. Teaming up with the main …

Still Unconstitutional: Our Nation's Experiment With State-Sponsored Sex Segregation In Education, David S. Cohen, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Since federal regulations authorized single-sex education in 2006, there has been an explosion of single-sex schools and classes. Although the Supreme Court has not ruled, three federal court decisions have addressed the constitutionality of single-sex classes, and the issue will percolate toward Supreme Court review soon. The arguments are that parents should have choices and “diversity” of educational options, that “brain research” shows that boys and girls are so biologically different to need sex-specific educational environments, that educational outcomes are better, and single-sex learning environments allows boys and girls to break through gender stereotypes. This article dissects these arguments within …

The Diy Digital Exhibition Experience At Tarrant County College, Ayyoub Ajmi

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The Northeast Campus Library of Tarrant County College District in Texas used a Title III Grant to support an innovative project consisting of repurposing old laptops as digital exhibition platforms available to students, faculty and staff. A small number of the frames are used for library promotion displaying FAQs, new acquisitions, and events. The rest of the digital frames are used for exhibition purposes. The project’s mission is to promote student success by increasing library attendance, promote the use of library services by building dynamic and long-term partnerships with other departments, and provide exposure and recognition to students, faculty and …

Where Schools Close In Chicago, Randall K. Johnson

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It is often assumed that schools close, disproportionately, in disadvantaged parts of Chicago. The assumption, however, has yet to be substantiated by research. As a result, this article tests the assumption in order to explain where schools close in Chicago. It does so by introducing a new Chicago Public School (CPS) closings dataset. The dataset sheds some light on the phenomenon by identifying 130 schools that closed, twenty-seven ZIP codes that experienced CPS closings and three demographic characteristics of these ZIP codes. In the process, this dataset helps to explain how CPS closings relate to race, income and location.

Why Police Learn From Third-Party Data, Randall K. Johnson

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This essay argues that third-party data collection, particularly of administrative complaints and departmental audit information, holds greater promise than lawsuit data collection. It does so by asserting that third-party data collection is more useful for three reasons. First, third-party data collection prevents manipulation by individual police officers and law enforcement agencies. Second, it assures that police behavioral trends are actually identified. Lastly, third-party data collection helps to deter published § 1983 cases. The essay, however, only models and tests the final claim.

Time To Blossom: An Inquiry Into Bloom’S Taxonomy As A Hierarchy And Means For Teaching Legal Research Skills, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Within law librarianship and legal education, there has been far too little scholarly engagement on the underlying pedagogy at the heart of legal research instruction. To correct this deficiency, law librarianship needs to open a dialogue and should consider adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy as a common schema for a collaborative effort.

This paper was initially presented at the "Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching," held at the University of Colorado Law School on June 21-22, 2009, as part of its Boulder Summer Conference Series. It follows the author's own recently published challenge to law librarianship and legal research instructors to …

Thinking Like A Research Expert: Schemata For Teaching Complex Problem-Solving Skills, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

The difference between expert and novice problem solvers is that experts have organized their thinking into schemata or mental constructs to both see and solve problems. This article demonstrates why schemata are important, arguing that they need to be made explicit in the classroom. It illustrates the use of schemata to understand and categorize complex research problems, map the terrain of legal research resources, match appropriate resources to types of problems, and work through the legal research process. The article concludes by calling upon librarians and research instructors to produce additional schemata and develop a common hierarchical taxonomy of skills, …

Law And Heidegger’S Question Concerning Technology: Prolegomenon To Future Law Librarianship, Paul D. Callister

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Following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger offered one of the most potent criticisms of technology and modern life. His nightmare is a world whose essence has been reduced to the functional equivalent of a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. "This relation of man to the world [is] in principle a technical one . . . [It is] altogether alien to former ages and histories. For Heidegger, the problem is not technology itself, but the technical mode of thinking that has accompanied it." Such a viewpoint of the world is a useful …

Law's Box: Law, Jurisprudence And The Information Ecosphere, Paul D. Callister

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For so long as it has been important to know what the law is, the practice of law has been an information profession. Nonetheless, just how the information ecosphere affects legal discourse and thinking has never been systematically studied. Legal scholars study how law attempts to regulate information flow, but they say little about how information limits, shapes, and provides a medium for law to operate.

Part I of the paper introduces a holistic approach to medium theory - the idea that methods of communication influence social development and ideology - and applies the theory to the development of legal …

Beyond Training: Law Librarianship's Quest For The Pedagogy Of Legal Research Education, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

The paper (I) outlines the nature and extent of the dissatisfaction with legal research instruction and demonstrates that the problem predates computer-assisted legal research, (II) presents the history of the debate (focusing on a heated exchange between advocates of a "process-oriented" approach and proponents of the traditional, "bibliographic" methods), and (III) presents the requisite elements of a satisfactory pedagogical model, discussing various issues surrounding each of these elements.

In part III, the paper proposes that a complete pedagogical model requires (A) an identifiable and fully understood objective in teaching legal research (which objective must distinguish between the kinds of research …

Without Fear Or Favor: Judge James Edwin Horton And The Trial Of The Scottsboro Boys, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.