Law Commons^™

Strategic Citations: Beyond The Bluebook, David J.S. Ziff

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Lawyers love thinking about writing. We love it so much that this issue of the Litigation and Trial Practice-Staff Council Committee Newsletter is devoted to writing tips. And for good reason. Words are our business, so we want to ensure that we’re using them as effectively as possible.

Often, however, when lawyers discuss writing, we ignore an important part of what we write. Sprinkled throughout our carefully crafted prose, legal writing includes other, uglier sentences—sentences with their own grammar of sorts, those little clumps of italicized case names, the reporter numbers and abbreviations, often with multiple parentheticals at the end. …

Citation, Slavery, And The Law As Choice: Thoughts On Bluebook Rule 10.7.1(D), David J.S. Ziff

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Today, more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, lawyers and judges continue to rely on antebellum decisions that tacitly or expressly approve of slavery. This reliance often occurs without any acknowledgement of the precedent’s immoral and legally dubious provenance. Modern use of these so-called “slave cases” was the subject of Professor Justin Simard’s 2020 article, Citing Slavery. In response to Professor Simard’s article, the latest edition of The Bluebook includes Rule 10.7.1(d), which requires authors to indicate parenthetically when a decision involves an enslaved person as a party or the property at issue. Unfortunately, Rule 10.7.1(d) …

The Benefits Of Integrating Statutory Construction And Analysis In A First-Year Legal Writing Course, Lauren E. Sancken, Mireille Butler

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Teaching statutory analysis to first-year law school students not only reinforces important principles of legal analysis and writing (from gaining a better understanding of the hierarchy of legal authorities to continuing to practice IRAC/CRAC methods of organization), but it also prepares students better for the actual practice of law.

Bringing The Court Into The Classroom: Suggestions For How To Craft Exercises For Upper-Level Courses Using Real Practitioners' Briefs, Benjamin Halasz

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When I came to teach after practicing for over a decade, I wanted my students to learn to write by using materials from real clients and cases. I quickly found that’s easier said than done. But through experimentation and discussions with experienced colleagues, I found several successful ways to put students into the role of writing parts of a “real” brief—one that uses a real case and real facts—for short, in-class exercises in upper-level courses.

Several articles tout the benefits of using briefs as examples, an enthusiasm I join. But this article focuses on using cases, and especially briefs, as …

Freedom In Structure: Helping Foreign-Trained And International Graduate Students Develop Thesis Statements By Component, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

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This article explains how foreign-trained and international graduate students can use a thesis development template to find and articulate narrow, novel, non-obvious, and useful claims for their final, academic papers in law. These students, in particular, are in need of clear direction and methods for crafting well-developed claims (or thesis statements), given that many are non-native speakers of English who trained in different legal and educational systems with different expectations about what constitutes good academic writing—in any genre, let alone law. Through the use of a thesis development template (adapted from writing advice by Joseph M. Williams and Eugene Volokh), …

The Worst System Of Citation Except For All The Others, David J.S. Ziff

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Now in its twentieth edition, The Bluebook continues to cast its shadow over the legal profession just as it has for almost 100 years, helping legal writers format their references to authorities in briefs, memoranda, opinions, and law review articles. Previous critiques have offered various theories for why, despite its problems, The Bluebook remains the standard for legal citation. Ivy League elitism, the first-mover advantage, and lawyers’ conservative preference for the status quo have all been offered to explain the seemingly inexplicable: If this system is so terrible, then why are we still stuck with it?

One potential answer to …

Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter

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Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts …

Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

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This Article attempts to use linguistics, specifically text analysis and pragmatics, to help explain how and why lawyers who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) struggle with cohesion in their U.S. legal writing. Then in light of that discussion, it offers a four-step, receptive and productive exercise to engage students in contrastive analysis of cohesive features across languages and cultures.

It begins by distinguishing coherence (top-down flow related to rhetorical preferences and organization of content and argument) from cohesion (bottom-up flow related to the surface features that exhibit connections between clauses). As background, it explores the role of cohesion in …

Student-Edited Law Reviews And Their Role In U.S. Legal Education, Daniel H. Foote

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>p>For well over a centur y student-edited law reviews have been a major vehicle for publication of scholarship on law in the United States. At those law reviews, students bear responsibility for nearly all aspects of the publication process, including the vitally important task of selecting what works will be published. Criticisms have been raised over various aspects of this system, but they have not stemmed the rise of student-edited law reviews. Today, such law reviews are firmly entrenched as a central feature of the U.S. legal system; and, facilitat­ ed by advances in technology, the number of student-edited …

Changing Fashions In Advocacy: 100 Years Of Brief-Writing Advice, Helen A. Anderson

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American appellate practice is accomplished mainly through the written word, and there seems to be a modem consensus about what constitutes a good appellate brief. Books, articles, and continuing legal education materials tell the appellate advocate to be succinct, to organize arguments clearly, and to present facts and law truthfully yet persuasively. The ideal appellate advocate is a careful strategist and accurate researcher who writes crisply and credibly. The power of emotional or narrative arguments has not been stressed although this may be changing-because appellate judges are presumed to be less emotional than juries.

As one who teaches advocacy, and …

Insights From Clinical Teaching: Learning About Teaching Legal Writing From Working On Real Cases, Helen A. Anderson

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I began teaching legal writing in 1994, but I've since had the occasional foray into practice through supervising students who represented clients in our state's appellate courts. I directed an appellate clinic for two years, and most recently supervised two students who briefed and argued a case in the Washington State Supreme Court. These experiences have taught me some important lessons that I have brought back to my legal writing classes. The clinical cases have not only reminded me what writing for practice really entails, and how hard it is to follow our sage writing advice, but they have given …

Public Interest Research, Collaboration, And The Promise Of Wikis, Tom Cobb

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One of my central goals in teaching law is to help students find ways to apply their emerging analytical powers and professional skills to promote the public interest.A related goal is to create an engaging learning experience in which students see each other—and other members of the legal community—as key resources in their education.

To help accomplish these goals, I have been formally and informally collaborating with clinics—the traditional home of public interest law and collaborative learning in most law schools— to find ways to infuse my legal writing classes with clinical methods and values. This article describes a class …

Books? Why?, Penny A. Hazelton

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Yes, we still need law books.

What Law Librarians Collect, Penny Hazelton

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No abstract provided.

Develop The Habit: Note-Taking In Legal Research, Penny A. Hazelton, Peggy Roebuck Jarrett, Nancy Mcmurrer, Mary Whisner

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No abstract provided.

The Literature Labyrinth Of Nuclear Power: A Bibliography, Penny Hazelton

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The first part is a survey of the basic sources available to a person researching a problem on nuclear power. Three forms are discussed—bibliographies, U.S. government documents, and current awareness materials. The second portion is a selection of significant books on nuclear power and the law published since 1960. The third and final portion is a subject arrangement of law review articles published between 1957 and 1975. Used in conjunction with Atomic Energy and the Law: A Bibliography and Blueprint for Atomic Energy Literature: Legislative and Legal, this survey and bibliography will give the researcher a lead to the …

Law Books And Law Publishers, Arthur S. Beardsley

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There are indications that the depression, which has burdened us for the past five years, is slowly receding. In its wake will doubtless follow renewed prosperity with all the blessings of peace and contentment. A freedom from financial worry will replace the present fear, and money will be more plentifully earned and freely expended.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the problems encountered during this economic cycle will be soon forgotten. Will the members of the legal profession and the law libraries return to their former policies of, what has appeared to be, uncontrolled and ill-advised purchasing of the …

The Law School Library—A Library Of Research For Lawyer, Layman, And Legislator, Arthur S. Beardsley

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We will probably agree that the college or university as a seat of learning must develop and maintain library facilities commensurate with the standing before the world which the institution's progress has earned. The library, and of course we include the law school library, is one of the indices of an educational institution's efficiency, and as such, we expect it to grow and expand by adding to the richness of its collections, material of ever increasing importance and usefulness. We expect the college library to take the lead in gathering for future reference the materials valuable for research which, on …