Law Commons^™

Thinking Like A Lawyer Or Acting Like A Judge: A Response To Professor Simon, David Yellen

Articles

Professor William Simon argues that the principal professional responsibility of all lawyers should be to "seek justice."' He defines this as pursuing the client's rights, but not the client's interests, if those interests are incompatible with the "truth." As a concrete example of this approach, Professor Simon states that it would normally be inappropriate for a lawyer to subject a vulnerable, but accurate, witness to cross examination intended to create the impression that the witness' testimony was mistaken.

In my view, Professor Simon's position would not really further "justice" at all. In these brief comments, by focusing on the likely …

The Internet Changes Everything: Revolutionizing Public Participation And Access To Government Information Through The Internet, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

The internet holds great promise when agencies affirmatively use it to solicit public in- put during initial policy development in either notice and comment rule- making, or in the initial development of interpretive rules, guidelines, or policies. The Clinton administration has embraced such a vision. Many federal agencies actively use the Internet to disseminate government information and solicit public input on important policy matters. This Article explores the manner in which the Internet and similar technological innovations can be, and are being, used to expand public access to government information and to increase public participation in all forms of agency …

The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining

Articles

Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …

Yesterday Once More: Skeptics, Scribes And The Demise Of Law Reviews, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

This article responds to a series of commentaries on my 1996 Web-posted article Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace (reprinted in 71 New York University Law Review 615 (1996)) collected in a Special Issue of the Akron Law Review (Volume 30, Number 2, Winter 1996). Last Writes? argued that the development of Internet technology allows and should encourage legal scholars to move away from traditional law review publication - with all of its well-publicized problems - towards a “self-publishing” system in which articles uploaded to the Internet by their scholarly authors could be archived centrally …

The Role Of Clinical Programs In Legal Education, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

In clinic, students get a glance at the lawyer they will be someday. They gain confidence that, indeed, they will be a "good" lawyer. They understand the context in which their classroom learning will be applied. In short, they are able to integrate their law school experience.

We Could Pass A Law...What Might Happen If Contingent Legal Fees Were Banned, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

This is an exercise in fantasy. My task is to imagine what would happen if we simply abolished the institution of the contingent fee by statute. I cannot justify that task on grounds of urgency. Contingent fees are not about to be abolished, and they probably.are not going to be seriously restricted. My hope is that the exercise will be amusing in itself, and that in the process we might learn something about contingent fees as we now use them.