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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Holy Grail? Designing And Teaching An Integrated Doctrine And Drafting Course, Claire C. Robinson May
The Holy Grail? Designing And Teaching An Integrated Doctrine And Drafting Course, Claire C. Robinson May
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
I’ve long considered teaching doctrine and skills together in a single course to be the holy grail of legal education. If we could do so successfully, we might make significant strides in providing a legal education that better prepares our students to be practicing lawyers. In spring 2016, my colleague Professor April Cherry and I took the plunge and collaboratively offered a course titled Estates and Trusts: Doctrine and Drafting at our institution, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. This essay describes our experience and lessons learned pursuing the holy grail.
Ethics Of Using Artificial Intelligence To Augment Drafting Legal Documents, David Hricik
Ethics Of Using Artificial Intelligence To Augment Drafting Legal Documents, David Hricik
Articles
Skynet is not and may never be self-aware, but machines are al-ready doing legal research, drafting legal documents, negotiating disputes such as traffic tickets and divorce schedules, and even drafting patent applications. Machines learn from us, and each other, to augment the ability of lawyers to represent clients—and even to replace lawyers completely. While it also threatens lawyers’ jobs, the exponential increase in the capacity of machines to transmit, store, and process data presents the opportunity for lawyers to use these services to provide better, cheaper, or faster legal representation to clients. By way of familiar example, instead of determining …
Visual Clarity In Contract Drafting, Karin Mika
Visual Clarity In Contract Drafting, Karin Mika
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
No abstract provided.
A Third Semester Of Lrw: Why Teaching Transactional Skills And Problems Is Now Essential To The Legal Writing Curriculum, Karin Mika
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
The article advocates including drafting and transactional courses in Legal Writing programs to better prepare students for practice. The article also advocates teaching various upper level skills courses so that students learn "soft skills," such as dealing with clients and understanding their personal legal needs.
Controlling Inadvertent Ambiguity In The Logical Structure Of Legal Drafting By Means Of The Prescribed Definitions Of The A-Hohfeld Structural Language, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon
Controlling Inadvertent Ambiguity In The Logical Structure Of Legal Drafting By Means Of The Prescribed Definitions Of The A-Hohfeld Structural Language, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon
Articles
Two principal sources of imprecision in legal drafting (vagueness and ambiguity) are identified and illustrated. Virtually all of the ambiguity imprecision encountered in legal discourse is ambiguity in the language used to express logical structure, and virtually all of· the imprecision resulting is inadvertent. On the other hand, the imprecision encountered in legal writing that results from vagueness is frequently, if not most often, included there deliberately; the drafter has considered it and decided that the vague language· best accomplishes the purpose at hand. This paper focuses on the use of some defined terminology for minimizing inadvertent ambiguity in the …
Plain English Statutes And Readability: Pt. 1 - History, The Problem And The Case For A Statute, Reed Dickerson
Plain English Statutes And Readability: Pt. 1 - History, The Problem And The Case For A Statute, Reed Dickerson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
In 1965 Reed Dickerson, Professor of Law at the University of Indiana Law School, wrote the classic Fundamentals of Legal Drafting, published by Little Brown and Co., Boston, a book that has become the most referred to of all books on legal drafting. Little Brown and Co. will soon be publishing Professor Dickerson's Second Edition of Fundamentals of Legal Drafting. With the permission of the author and the publishers, the Michigan Bar Journal and the Plain English Committee are pleased to present excerpts from a chapter in the Second Edition regarding plain English statutes and readability.
Plain English Statutes And Readability: Pt. 2 - Readability Formulas And Specifications For A "Plain English" Statute, Reed Dickerson
Plain English Statutes And Readability: Pt. 2 - Readability Formulas And Specifications For A "Plain English" Statute, Reed Dickerson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
In 1965 Reed Dickerson, Professor of Low at the University of Indiana Law School, wrote the classic Fundamentals of Legal Drafting, published by Little Brown and Co., Boston, a book that has become the most referred to of all books on legal drafting. Little Brown and Co. will soon be publishing Professor Dickerson's Second Edition of Fundamentals of Legal Drafting. With the permission of the author and the publishers, the Michigan Bar Journal and the Plain English Committee are pleased to present excerpts from a chapter in the Second Edition regarding plain English statutes and readability. "Part I - History, …
Techniques Of Legal Drafting: A Survival Manual, Peter N. Swisher
Techniques Of Legal Drafting: A Survival Manual, Peter N. Swisher
Law Faculty Publications
The purpose of this article is to identify and demonstrate various legal drafting concepts and techniques in order to give the law student and legal practitioner a working knowledge of the fundamental principles of legal drafting. Although this article does not purport to be an exhaustive treatise on the subject, it is offered to law students and practitioners alike for what it is-a basic survival manual for the aspiring legal draftsman.
Language, Law, And Logic: Plain Legal Drafting For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen
Language, Law, And Logic: Plain Legal Drafting For The Electronic Age, Layman E. Allen
Book Chapters
The achievement of current demands for clearer legal drafting in the United States (New York, 1973 and President's Executive Order, 1978) and Great Britain (Renton Report, 1975) can be aided by applying modern logic to improve the language of the law. In considering how the expression of legal norms can be clarified by using some formal language techniques, particular attention will be given to alternatives for dealing with problems of inadvertent imprecision in current legal drafting, alternatives that facilitate human understanding as well as enhance the possibilities for analysis by computer. A brief sketch of the imprecision of the expression …
Normalized Legal Drafting And The Query Method, Layman E. Allen, C. Rudy Engholm
Normalized Legal Drafting And The Query Method, Layman E. Allen, C. Rudy Engholm
Articles
Normalized legal drafting is a mode of expressing ideas in statutes, regulations, contracts, and other legal documents in such a way that the syntax that relates the constituent propositions is simplified and standardized. This "normalization" results in documents that are easier to understand in the dual sense that they can be read faster and more accurately than corresponding documents that are not normalized. The query method is a technique for familiarizing learners with normalized drafting and providing practice in some of the easier aspects of doing it.
General Considerations In Legal Drafting, Reed Dickerson
General Considerations In Legal Drafting, Reed Dickerson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Better Organization Of Legal Knowledge, Layman E. Allen, Tomoyuki Ohta
Better Organization Of Legal Knowledge, Layman E. Allen, Tomoyuki Ohta
Articles
The increasing need of legislatures to draft complicated statutes, e.g., the Internal Revenue Code, requires the development of new techniques for defining and communicating complicated policies both accurately and understandably. At present, these complicated statutes are expressed in long, convoluted sentences with frequent uses of exceptions and limitations. Current drafting technique, with its inadequacies, often hinders a comprehensive understanding of the policy being communicated and often fails to communicate the policy accurately. Moreover, with the voluminous increase of legal literature in recent times, legal researchers experience increasing difficulty in attempting to retrieve relevant judicial and administrative interpretations. The authors propose …
Legislative Drafting In London And In Washington, Reed Dickerson
Legislative Drafting In London And In Washington, Reed Dickerson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Symbolic Logic: A Razor-Edged Tool For Drafting And Interpreting Legal Documents, Layman E. Allen
Symbolic Logic: A Razor-Edged Tool For Drafting And Interpreting Legal Documents, Layman E. Allen
Articles
A large amount of the litigation based on written instruments-whether statute, contract, will, conveyance or regulation-can be traced to the draftsman's failure to convey his meaning clearly. Frequently, of course, certain items may purposely be left ambiguous, but often the question in issue is due to an inadvertent ambiguity that could have been avoided had the draftsman clearly expressed what he intended to say. In this Article it is suggested that a new approach to drafting, using certain elementary notions of symbolic logic, can go a long way towards eliminating such inadvertent ambiguity. This new approach makes available to draftsmen …