Law Commons^™

Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry

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Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.

Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

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I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

Govern Yourself Accordingly- Crafting Effective Demand Letters, Jason G. Dykstra

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An effective demand letter can expediently resolve a dispute without litigation. But a poorly conceived demand letter can accelerate a dispute toward litigation and even generate negative publicity. Like all correspondence, demand letters need to be tailored in tone and content for varied audience, both the intended recipient and other foreseeable recipients. Beyond the intended recipient, the audience for a demand letter could encompass insurance adjusters, in-house counsel, and perhaps even the public via social media or press coverage. Therefore, an effective demand letter should not only be polite but firm, but also tell a persuasive story that evokes incredulity …

Enhancing The Effectiveness Of Your Legal Writing, Jason G. Dykstra

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This article focuses on areas where busy practitioners can aspire for plain English and not only improve their writing but possibly avoid a few pitfalls. As Justice Brandeis once remarked, "There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting" So here are three areas to focus on as you rewrite: minimizing initialisms, acronyms, and defined terms; losing legal jargon and cutting clutter; and balancing legal terms and precision.

Bridging The Gap: Transitioning Law School Legal Writing Skills To Practicing Law, Jason G. Dykstra

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No abstract provided.

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

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This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

To Verb Or Not To Verb, Jason G. Dykstra

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No abstract provided.

What Is "Good Legal Writing" And Why Does It Matter?, Mark Osbeck

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Law schools face increasing pressure to improve instruction in practice-oriented skills. One of the most important of these skills is legal writing. The existing literature on legal writing contains various rules and suggestions as to how legal writers can improve their writing skills. Yet it lacks an adequate theoretical account of the fundamental nature of good legal writing. As a result, legal writers are left without a solid conceptual framework to ground the individual rules and suggestions. This Article attempts to fill the theoretical void in the literature by offering a systematic analysis of what it is for a legal …

Religious Shunning And The Beam In The Lawyer's Eye, Edward R. Becker

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Some LRW professors design assignments so that students begin learning fundamental legal skills in the context of issues of particular interest to the professor-–what Sue Liemer calls “teaching the law you love.” Recent articles have explained how this might work when applied to such varying matters as multiculturalism or transactional practice. But exposing LRW students to diversity of religious belief does not appear to have found as much traction, at least in the literature. This essay describes one attempt to design a problem that grounds students in just such a larger firmament, while not distracting students (or the professor) from …

If I Had A Hammer: Can Shepardizing, Synthesis, And Other Tools Of Legal Writing Help Build Hope For Law Students?, Edward R. Becker

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Are lawyers mechanics? In 1920, photographer Lewis Hines took a striking photo of a powerhouse mechanic sure-handedly wielding a large wrench to tighten bolts on a steam pump. This picture may bring to mind many things, but I suspect that many legal writing professors in our (past or present) incarnations as practicing attorneys would not look at this image and think, "My job is a lot like that." Similarly, I assume that many of our students do not think of a lawyer's role in this way. Indeed, many of our students might have chosen to pursue a career in law …

Why I Write (And Why I Think Law Professors Generally Should Write), Yale Kamisar

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As my colleague James Boyd White has observed, It may look as though we are all doing the same thing, as we huddle over our typewriters or computers, producing work called articles or books, but we are in fact often doing very different things, and I think it is important to recognize and value these differences, in ourselves and in others. There are not only differences in what we write but in whom it is that we write for. Unlike Professor White,2 I usually write as professional to professional. Again, unlike Professor White,3 I am fairly comfortable with "the voice …

A Look Back On A Half-Century Of Teaching, Writing And Speaking About Criminal Law And Criminal Procedure, Yale Kamisar

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When I look back at my academic career, I realize that, as hard as I tried to plan things, various events often overrode my plans.

The Lawyer As Legal Scholar, Michael J. Madison

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I review Eugene Volokh's recent book, Academic Legal Writing. The book is nominally directed to law students and those who teach them (and for those audiences, it is outstanding), but it also contains a number of valuable lessons for published scholars. The book is more than a writing manual, however. I argue that Professor Volokh suggests implicitly that scholarship is underappreciated as a dimension of the legal profession. A well-trained lawyer, in other words, should have experience as a scholar. The argument sheds new light on ongoing discussions about the character of law schools.

The Writings Of John Barker Waite And Thomas Davies On The Search And Seizure Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

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After browsing through many volumes of the Michigan Law Review, searching for the article I would discuss on the occasion of the law review's 100th anniversary, I wound up with two "finalists": a 1955 article by Professor John Barker Waite on the law of arrest search and seizure (on further reflection, four Michigan Law Review commentaries on the general subject written by Waite between 1933 and 1955)' and a monumental 200-page article (surely one of the longest articles ever to appear in the Michigan Law Review) by Thomas Davies on the "original Fourth Amendment. 2

Joe Grano: The 'Kid From South Philly' Who Educated Us All (In Tribute To Joseph D. Grano), Yale Kamisar

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No serious student of police interrogation and confessions can write on the subject without building on Professor Joseph D. Grano's work or explaining why he or she disagrees with him (and doing so with considerable care). Nor is that all.

Bouquets For Jerry Israel, Yale Kamisar

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As it turned out, of those asked to write a few words for an issue of the Michigan Law Review honoring Jerry Israel, I was the last to do so. And when I submitted my brief contribution to the Law Review I took the liberty of reading what the four others who paid tribute to Jerry had written. As a result, I feel like the fifth and last speaker at a banquet who listens to others say much of what he had planned to say.

Making Motions: The Embodiment Of Law In Gestures, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

In contemporary America, the locus of legal meaning is habitually deemed to be the written word. This article pushes our conception of law’s “text” beyond its traditional inscripted bounds by focusing on physical gesture as a legal instrumentality. The few studies of legal gesture undertaken to date have explained its prominence in various legal systems and cultural environments, the significance of specific legal gestures in specific historic contexts, and the depiction of legal gestures in particular manuscripts or other specific physical settings, but no one has considered the general functions of legal gesture as a modality.

In an effort to …

Wayne R. Lafave: Search And Seizure Commentator At Work And Play, Yale Kamisar, Jerold H. Israel

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Starting in 1969,1 we have had the honor and pleasure of co-authoring a goodly number of casebooks, texts, treatises, pocket parts, and annual supplements (more than twenty) with Wayne LaFave.2 On each occasion we have been impressed by the quality of his mind and the judiciousness of his temperament, and impressed as well (and sometimes amazed) by his speed and efficiency.

Edward L. Barrett, Jr.: The Critic With 'That Quality Of Judiciousness Demanded Of The Court Itself', Yale Kamisar

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Barrett was as talented and as dedicated a law teacher as any of his distinguished (or soon-to-become-distinguished) contemporaries. But Barrett resisted the movement toward new rights in fields where none had existed before. At least, he was quite uneasy about the trend. To be sure, others in law teaching shared Barrett's concern that the clock was spinning too fast. Indeed, some others were quite vociferous about it.' But because his criticism was cerebral rather than emotional - because he fairly stated and fully explored the arguments urging the courts to increase their tempo in developing constitutional rights - Barrett was …

Francis A. Allen: 'Confront[Ing] The Most Explosive Problems' And 'Plumbing All Issues To Their Full Depth Without Fear Or Prejudice', Yale Kamisar

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Frank Allen began his distinguished teaching career more than thirty-five years ago - at a time when, at more law schools than we like to remember, "the basic criminal law course was routinely assigned to the youngest and most vulnerable member of the faculty or to that colleague suspected of mild brain damage and hence incompetent to deal with courses that really matter."' That those of us who taught criminal law years later were warmly received by our colleagues is in no small measure a tribute to the quality of mind and character and intellectual energy of people like Allen, …

Fred E. Inbau: 'The Importance Of Being Guilty', Yale Kamisar

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As fate would have it, Fred Inbau graduated from law school in 1932, the very year that, "for practical purposes the modern law of constitutional criminal procedure [began], with the decision in the great case of Powell v. Alabama."1 In "the 'stone age' of American criminal procedure,"2 Inbau began his long fight to shape or to retain rules that "make sense in the light of a policeman's task,"3 more aware than most that so long as the rules do so, "we will be in a stronger position to insist that [the officer] obey them."4