Law Commons^™

'Aux Armes, Citoyens!:' Time For Law Schools To Lead The Movement For Free And Open Access To The Law, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article is a manifesto that outlines the principles of the open access to legal information movement and sounds a call to action for law schools to become leaders in that movement. The article surveys the present legal information environment, reviews the development of computer-assisted legal information and the long-term future of book-based legal research, and discusses the problems inherent in a system where two large “information resource” corporations control access to legal information. After considering the need for open access to the law for pro se litigants, scholars from outside the legal academy, and practicing lawyers, after considering and …

Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation And America's Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion To Bibliographical Orthodoxy And The Constriction Of Open And Equal Access To The Law, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system's devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals – The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual – has on open access to the law. In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal …

Conducting The Constitution: Justice Scalia, Textualism, And The Eroica Symphony, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article summarizes various modes of Constitutional and musical interpretation and imagines how Justice Antonin Scalia might interpret Beethoven's Eroica symphony using the Constitutional interpretative philosophy he espouses.

Socio-Economics - An Overview, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Socio-Economics is a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach to economics that has gained growing acceptance in legal education and that is helpful in advocating economics justice. Socio-economics approaches economic understanding much as Adam Smith did (before there were separate disciplines) with a foundation based on natural and moral philosophy. Nevertheless, it explicitly acknowledges the powerful and pervasive influence of the neoclassical paradigm on contemporary thought. Recognizing that people first adopt paradigms of thought and then perform their inductive, deductive, and empirical analyses, socio-economists seek to examine the assumptions of the neoclassical paradigm, develop a rigorous understanding of its limitations, improve upon its …

"Who Are Those Guys?:" The Results Of A Survey Studying The Information Literacy Of Incoming Law Students, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article presents the results of a summer 2006 survey of students about to begin their first year of law school. In total, 740 students from seven different law schools responded to the survey. The survey gathered general information from the students, as well as self-evaluative data on student reading, writing, and research habits in an attempt to understand how the students perceive their skills in these crucial areas. The survey data suggest that while there is some positive news to report, incoming law students overestimate their writing and research skills and come to law school inadequately trained in information …

Mapping The Social Life Of The Law: An Alternative Approach To Legal Research, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

As the law moves inexorably to a digital publication model in which books no longer play a role, the problem of how to continue to make the law available to all becomes more acute. Open access initiatives already exist, and more are on the way, but all are limited by their inability to provide more than self-indexed search options for their users. Self-indexing, although a powerful alternative to the traditional pre-indexed searching made possible by systems like West’s “Key Number” digests, has inherent limitations which make it a poor choice as the sole means of researching the law. But developing …

The Changing Climate For United States Law, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Just a few years ago, the subject of American climate change law would not merit an article like this one, let alone the book that the American Bar Association has recently published on the subject. But the United States has changed, at least somewhat. At the moment, most important United States climate change law consists of state and local law, but there are signs that the federal government may create significant climate change law as well, at least after President Bush leaves office.

This article has two goals. The obvious one is simply to describe some of the American climate …

An Economic Dynamic Approach To The Infrastructure Commons, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay comments upon and extends Brett Frischman's idea of the infrastructure commons, i.e. that certain commons resources function as infrastructure. After suggesting some refinements of the infrastructure commons theory, this essay shows how an economic dynamic approach to law (see David M. Driesen, The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law (MIT Press 2003) can help strengthen the case for proper management of the infrastructure commons, helping bolster the case for preserving the commons and identifying some of its limitations. The essay, like Professor Frischman's original article, applies infrastructure commons theory to both environmental and intellectual property resources.