Law Commons^™

Wandering Into Psychology And Law, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Some people have a passion for a single topic that motivates and engages them for life. I’m not one of them. I can get interested in almost anything, and my career looks more like a random walk through a candy store than a single-minded pursuit of a goal. I am both a theorist and researcher in the field of emotion and a contributor to the application of psychology to legal issues. In this piece I will focus on my work in psychology and law. A review of my research on emotion can be found in Ellsworth and Scherer (2003).

Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District …

Happily Ever After, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

I have been lucky in my upbringing and education, and especially in having advisors who let me do what I wanted to even when they didn’t think it was a good idea. This allowed me to have a deeply rewarding career devoted to two entirely different topics – basic theory and research on emotion, and applied theory and research in psychology and law. My career spanned the period from when women were considered unsuitable for scientific or academic work through the rise of feminism, so although I faced obstacles, the culture was changing quickly enough that my unusual choices soon …

Examining The Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The Uniform Bar Examination, Scott Devito, Kelsey Hample, Erin Lain

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates …

Trek To Triumph, Briaunna Buckner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

I was screaming in the stairwell of my home, holding a dead baby. The air was so thick that I could barely breathe. Tears were racing down my face as her twin sister, Zola, was screeching at the top of her lungs. “WHY LORD, don't take my baby!” Every emotion, every word, and every second after that moment felt black. All the sweet memories from just eight days of being able to hold her, kiss her, and love her fell in a black pit along with the dreams I had for my life. As I looked down at my sweet …

How To Improve Legal Representation Of Children In America's Child Welfare System, Donald Duquette

Law & Economics Working Papers

From 2009 to 2016 the University of Michigan Law School served as the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). This article provides the final recommendations of this project. These recommendations have not yet been published in the academic literature. This article first summarizes the research findings of the QIC-ChildRep project. Then it sets out QIC-ChildRep recommendations for: 1) Training and supervision of lawyers; 2) State statutes and rules governing lawyers for children; 3) State organizational structure to support child representation; 4) Strategies for recruiting lawyers in this specialty; 5) Caseload size; …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz

Law & Economics Working Papers

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgements paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those …

Professionalism In Tribal Jurisdictions, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

American Indian law is an important area of law. There are 12 federally recognized Indian tribes in the state of Michigan.1 Indian tribes throughout the United States do business in Michigan. Indian tribal governments and corporations employ hundreds of thousands of non-Indians and received billions in federal pandemic relief. Indian gaming generated nearly $40 billion in revenues nationally last year. Still, many lawyers ignore the field or claim ignorance about the basic precepts of federal Indian law.

This article will canvass several themes of professionalism in tribal practice, drawing from this author’s tribal law experience over the last few decades. …

Libraries & Legal Research: Resources For Technological Competency, Virginia Neisler

Law Librarian Scholarship

At the time this article was written, Michigan was one of 39 states that included understanding relevant technologies as a part of the duty of attorney competence. In 2019, the Michigan Supreme Court formally adopted a new comment to MRPC 1.1. With respect to competence as covered under this rule, their comment made explicit that all Michigan attorneys should “engage in continuing study and education, including the knowledge and skills regarding existing and developing technology that are reasonably necessary to provide competent representation for the client in a particular matter” [emphasis added].

In February 2020, the State Bar of Michigan …

The Stoic Litigator, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

A variety of events over the past several years have renewed my conversations with some reliable old friends. And I mean very old. I refer here to the Stoic philosophers, most of whom did their thinking and writing around the turn of the Common Era.

The Stoics took their name from the central square of Athens, the Stoa Poikile, where Zeno is generally credited with founding the school in the early part of the third century BCE. Various philosophers over the next five centuries identified themselves as Stoics, so the label takes in lots of personalities and lots of territory. …

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

Articles

I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?