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Full-Text Articles in Law

Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers Aug 2013

Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers

Articles

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail …


Reflections On The End Of The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, Aaron L. Nielson Aug 2013

Reflections On The End Of The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, Aaron L. Nielson

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

As applicants, federal judges, and law school career counselors everywhere frantically come to terms with the new clerkship landscape, one truth is inescapable: the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan ("the Plan") is dead. On January 29, 2013, the D.C. Circuit-the Plan's last and best defender-announced that it would no longer follow the Plan. The consequences of that announcement have been swift. For the last several months, months earlier than almost anyone expected, untold numbers of federal judges across the country have been rushing to hire law clerks. For these judges, the unregulated clerkship market of the pre-Plan era is back. …


Satisfaction In The Practice Of Law: Findings From A Long-Term Study Of Attorneys' Careers, U. Of Mich. Public Law Research Paper No. 330. (2013), David L. Chambers May 2013

Satisfaction In The Practice Of Law: Findings From A Long-Term Study Of Attorneys' Careers, U. Of Mich. Public Law Research Paper No. 330. (2013), David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

For forty years beginning in the late 1960s, the University of Michigan Law School conducted annual surveys of its alumni. The project included fifty successive graduating classes, with all but the most recent classes surveyed more than once. Over thirteen thousand alumni participated. Over the forty years, American legal education and the American legal profession underwent huge changes. When the study began, there were almost no women or minority students at Michigan and very few in the country as a whole. The vast majority of all students and lawyers were white and male. By the end, white men constituted far …


The Transformative Potential Of Attorney Bilingualism, Jayesh M. Rathod Apr 2013

The Transformative Potential Of Attorney Bilingualism, Jayesh M. Rathod

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In contemporary U.S. law practice, attorney bilingualism is increasingly valued, primarily because it allows lawyers to work more efficiently and to pursue a broader range of professional opportunities. This purely functionalist conceptualization of attorney bilingualism, however, ignores the surprising ways in which multilingualism can enhance a lawyer's professional work and can strengthen and reshape relationships among actors in the U.S. legal milieu. Drawing upon research from psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines, this Article advances a theory of the transformative potential of attorney bilingualism. Looking first to the development of lawyers themselves, the Article posits that attorneys who operate bilingually may, …


Oh, The Treatise!, Richard A. Danner Apr 2013

Oh, The Treatise!, Richard A. Danner

Michigan Law Review

In his foreword to the Michigan Law Review's 2009 Survey of Books Related to the Law, my former Duke colleague Erwin Chemerinsky posed the question: "[W]hy should law professors write?" In answering, Erwin took as a starting point the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship that Judge Harry Edwards published in this journal in 1992. Judge Edwards indicted legal scholars for failing to engage the practical problems facing lawyers and judges, writing instead for the benefit of scholars in law and other disciplines rather than for their professional audiences. He characterized "practical" legal scholarship as both prescriptive (aiming to instruct attorneys, …


Making Method Visible: Improving The Quality Of Science-Based Regulation, Pasky Pascual, Wendy Wagner, Elizabeth Fisher Apr 2013

Making Method Visible: Improving The Quality Of Science-Based Regulation, Pasky Pascual, Wendy Wagner, Elizabeth Fisher

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Scientific inferences are theories about how the world works that scientists formulate based on their observations. One of the most difficult issues at the intersection of law and science is to determine whether the weight of evidence supports one scientific inference versus other competing interpretations of the observations. In administrative law, this difficulty is exacerbated by the behavior of both the courts and regulatory agencies. Agencies seldom achieve the requisite visibility that explains the analytical methods they use to reach their scientific inferences. Courts—because they appreciate neither the variety of inferential methods nor their epistemic foundations—do not demand this level …


Sff Auction 2013, University Of Michigan Law School Mar 2013

Sff Auction 2013, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program for the March 21, 2013 Student Funded Fellowships Auction.


Late-Night Law Firms, Scott Hershovitz Jan 2013

Late-Night Law Firms, Scott Hershovitz

Reviews

But it turns out that those late-night lawyers may not deserve the scorn that they get. In Sunlight and Settlement Mills, Nora Freeman Engstrom argues that firms like the ones that advertise late at night have developed practice models that achieve many of the aims that reformers have for no-fault accident compensation schemes. They deliver compensation cheaply and quickly, because they settle almost every claim and nearly never go to court. They resolve claims predictably and consistently, on account of cozy relationships with insurance adjusters that lead to a shared sense as to what different sorts of claims are …


2013 Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony, University Of Michigan Law School Jan 2013

2013 Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program of ceremony honoring Valerie B. Jarrett, John M. Nannes, and Theodore J. St. Antoine.


Federal Constraints On States’ Ability To License An Undocumented Immigrant To Practice Law , Adam Wright Jan 2013

Federal Constraints On States’ Ability To License An Undocumented Immigrant To Practice Law , Adam Wright

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

No court has decided whether an undocumented immigrant can be admitted to a state bar in a manner consistent with federal law. At the time of this writing, the issue is pending before the California Supreme Court. Federal law prohibits states from providing public benefits to undocumented immigrants. In its definition of a “public benefit,” 8 U.S.C. § 1621 includes any professional license “provided by an agency of a State . . . or by appropriated funds of a State . . . .” The law’s prohibitions, however, are not unqualified. The statute’s “savings clause” allows states to provide public …


The Landscape Of The Legal Professions In Europe And The Usa: Continuity And Change, Xiaomeng Zhang Jan 2013

The Landscape Of The Legal Professions In Europe And The Usa: Continuity And Change, Xiaomeng Zhang

Law Librarian Scholarship

Overall, all articles in the book are thoroughly researched, documented, and presented with in-depth scholarly analyses. Although it is entitled The Landscape of the Legal Professions in the Europe and the USA, the European focus is apparent and dominant. On the other hand, comparative methodology is employed in most of the articles, either through a comparison of Europe nations and the United States, or through comparisons and contrasts among European countries. It will be of invaluable assistance to scholars interested in legal professions and legal system specifically and foreign and comparative law in general. It will be a great addition …


The Billable Hour Is Dead. Long Live…?, Robert Hirshon Jan 2013

The Billable Hour Is Dead. Long Live…?, Robert Hirshon

Articles

The legal profession, of course, quickly comprehended that pursuant to the hourly approach to billing, two factors were paramount: the total amount of hours it took to complete a matter and the amount of dollars charged per hour. As both transactions and litigation became more complex, law firms found it necessary and easy to justify adding bodies (read: hours) to their clients' legal projects. With the number of legal projects increasing as a result of explosive economic growth in both developed and developing nations, the demand for top legal talent during most of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was …


Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker Jan 2013

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.