Law Commons^™

Understanding The "Other" International Agreements, Ryan Harrington

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

The President routinely enters into international agreements with foreign states that circumvent the requirements in the Treaty Clause, leaving many researchers with a cloudy

understanding of the international agreement-making process in the United States. In many instances, Congress has preauthorized the President to negotiate and conclude an international commitment. In others, the majority of both houses of Congress, rather than two-thirds of the Senate, approve of an international agreement. Even more troublingly, in the last half century, the United States has come to rely on yet another form of international agreements, called “political commitments,” that create nonlegally binding expectations and …

Flying The Flag, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

This paper analyzes the accuracy with which descriptions of subsequent negative treatment are applied by an online citator system that employs a hierarchical controlled vocabulary -- Shepard's Citations -- as opposed to one that does not -- KeyCite. After a contextual review of the citator's history, a framework for assessment is proposed and employed to test the hypothesis that a citator employing a hierarchical controlled vocabulary would produce more accurate descriptions. The study's results suggest that a system making use of a hierarchical controlled vocabulary does apply descriptions of subsequent negative treatment in a marginally more accurate way. A discussion …

What About The Majority? Considering The Legal Research Practices Of Solo And Small Firm Attorneys, Joseph D. Lawson

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

Solo and small firm practitioners account for the majority of attorneys practicing in the United States. However, they are regularly underrepresented in studies of attorneys’ research practices, which tend to focus on attorneys in larger practice settings. This article reports the results of a local survey in which more than 80 percent of respondents fell into this forgotten demographic. Comparison of the local study with a recent national survey demonstrates that greater consideration of smaller firms could lead to a different understanding of fee-based online resource usage among the demographic, which may have widespread implications for public and academic law …

"Information Is Cheap, But Meaning Is Expensive": Building Analytical Skill Into Legal Research Instruction, Yasmin Sokkar Harker

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

Law students and new attorneys must have well-developed analytical skills in order to find information that is pertinent to their legal problems and to become competent legal researchers in today’s information-rich environment. Law librarians and legal research instructors can help develop students’ analytical skills by asking them to participate in activities that encourage metacognition about processes that are critical to information seeking.

A View From The Flip Side: Using The “Inverted Classroom” To Enhance The Legal Information Literacy Of The International Ll.M. Student, Catherine A. Lemmer

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

International students enrolled in LL.M. programs in U.S. law schools come with a wide variety of legal experience. As part of their introduction to U.S. law, students take a legal research course to prepare them to competently undertake the research necessary to complete a master’s thesis and to perform legal research in clinics, internships, externships, and U.S. law firms and legal departments. This article argues that the “flipped” classroom pedagogical model is a better method for developing legal information literacy in international LL.M. students than the traditional classroom model. In support of this, it presents the author’s experiences in implementing …