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Full-Text Articles in Law

Law Talk In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith Jan 2021

Law Talk In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Over three decades ago, Sarat and Felstiner published a ground-breaking ethnographic study of divorce client-lawyer conversations. They concluded that lawyers portrayed "a chaotic 'anti-system' in which [clients] cannot rely on the technical proficiency, or good faith, of judges and rival lawyers" but need to rely on their own lawyers' insider status to achieve reasonable outcomes.1 Although lawyers initially described the law and procedure to their clients, they rarely referenced that rational description when explaining what had occurred or would occur in their clients' cases. This law talk may have gradually and ultimately persuaded the clients to reach reasonable settlements, but …


Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith Jan 2020

Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school is supposed to teach legal analysis and lawyering skills as well as mold law students’ professional identities. Pro Bono work provides an opportunity for law students to use their legal knowledge and skills and to develop their identities as emerging legal professionals. As important as both pro bono work and identity formation are, there has been very little research regarding how pro bono contributes to students’ identity formation. This paper utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice clinic that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study …


Learning From Our Mistakes: Conversation Analysis Reveals Best Practices For A Student-Staffed Pro Bono Project, Linda F. Smith Jan 2020

Learning From Our Mistakes: Conversation Analysis Reveals Best Practices For A Student-Staffed Pro Bono Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law schools make “pro bono” opportunities available to students to introduce them to the responsibilities of the profession. Often these pro bono law students help in “brief advice” projects staffed by volunteer attorneys. This staffing-supervision structure presents challenges in ensuring clients receive competent, individualized advice and the students receive adequate oversight so that this is a positive learning experience for them. This paper analyzes transcripts from 46 recorded student-client interviews and 35 student-attorney consultations. It focuses on those cases where there were “errors or omissions” -- either the client got some erroneous advice or the client did not receive complete, …


The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith Jan 2020

The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school aims to teach lawyering skills as well as legal analysis. While all students must acquire the skills of legal analysis, research and writing, law schools may decide what other skills to teach. Students also acquire skills and habits in informal ways, through clerkship experiences or pro bono volunteer work. However, there has been almost no study of what “skills” students pick up in these informal ways, and whether there are skills that would better be learned as part of the curriculum. This study looks at the skill of legal interviewing employed by students in a pro bono brief …


Transcript - Conference On The Ethics Of Legal Scholarship, Nicky Booth-Perry, Stanley Fish, Neil W. Hamilton, Leslie Francis, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Paul Horwitz, Joseph D. Kearney, Chad M. Oldfather, Ryan Scoville, Eli Wald, Robin L. West Jul 2018

Transcript - Conference On The Ethics Of Legal Scholarship, Nicky Booth-Perry, Stanley Fish, Neil W. Hamilton, Leslie Francis, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Paul Horwitz, Joseph D. Kearney, Chad M. Oldfather, Ryan Scoville, Eli Wald, Robin L. West

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This is a transcript of the proceedings of the Conference on the Ethics of Legal Scholarship held at Marquette University Law School on September 15-16, 2017. Topics addressed include (1) what counts as legal scholarship and what is the obligation of neutrality?, (2) the obligations of sincerity, candor, and exhaustiveness, and (3) the mechanisms of legal scholarship, especially law reviews and the issues they create. The conference's working aim was to generate and propose a set of ethical guidelines for legal scholarship.


Frontiers In Precision Medicine Ii: Cancer, Big Data And The Public, Emily Coonrod, Jorge L. Contreras, Willard Dere, Jeffrey Botkin, Leslie Francis, Jim Tabery Jan 2017

Frontiers In Precision Medicine Ii: Cancer, Big Data And The Public, Emily Coonrod, Jorge L. Contreras, Willard Dere, Jeffrey Botkin, Leslie Francis, Jim Tabery

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Precision medicine is being developed within a complex landscape of public policy, science, economics, law, and regulation. In these and other policy areas, the goal of developing individually-tailored therapies poses novel challenges for health care research, delivery and policy. In this symposium, a range of experts in genetics, medicine, bioinformatics, intellectual property, health economics and bioethics identified and discussed many of the pressing questions raised by the development and practice of precision medicine. These and other issues will need to be taken into account as precision medicine moves ahead and becomes the standard of medical practice and care in the …