Law Commons^™

Linking Globally, Coping Locally: Cataloging Internet Resources At The University Of Colorado Law Library, Karen Selden

Publications

Web-based online public access catalogs (OPACs) enable catalogers to provide hotlinks to Internet-based resources of interest to their patrons. However, this capability is not without its challenges. Ms. Selden explores the local policy considerations associated with cataloging Internet resources and describes the policy-making process and some Internet cataloging policies used at the University of Colorado Law Library.

Forum Non Conveniens In Federal Statutory Cases, Keith A. Rowley, Lonny Sheinkopf Hoffman

Scholarly Works

This article, previously published in Volume 49 of the Emory Law Journal, examines the federal doctrine of forum non conveniens in cases in which the plaintiff asserts a right to relief under federal law. The arguments we advance - particularly our claim that the federal doctrine of forum non conveniens can be better understood not as turning on matters of convenience, as the formal doctrine suggests, but on an assessment of the relative sovereign interests in adjudicating the dispute - remain relevant to an understanding of the federal doctrine. The paper, thus, may be of interest to practitioners, academics and …

A Reflective Rhetorical Model: The Legal Writing Teacher As Reader And Writer, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Like most writing teachers, the legal writing teacher believes that his reading and response to student work is the most important thing he does, an importance that is underscored by the amount of time it takes. Yet, despite its importance and the hours it consumes, the rhetoric of teacher reading and writing remains relatively unexplored. This article proposes that we begin to apply what we have learned about student reading and writing to our own reading and writing. Our process of reading and responding to student work should be as reflective and rhetorical as the reading and writing process that …

Teaching The Cisg In Contracts, William S. Dodge

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Silence: Some Questions About Silence As Resistance, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Avoiding Common Problems In Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory And Experience, Edward R. Becker, Rachel Croskery-Roberts

Articles

A majority of American law schools rely on teaching assistants to help administer first-year legal writing, research, and analysis (LWRA) courses. Specifically, surveys jointly conducted by the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) consistently detail the extensive use many LWRA professors make of teaching assistants. Likewise, Julie Cheslik recognized in her article about her 1994 survey on the use of TAs in the typical LWRA course that "[o]ne of the most prevalent uses of peer teachers in the law school setting is the employment of upper-level law students as teaching assistants in the first-year …

Clinical Legal Education: Energy And Transformation, David J. Herring

Articles

The clinical movement has had a dramatic impact on the nation's law schools. Administrators and faculty members cannot successfully ignore it or wish it away. Instead, they must address it and seek ways to harness its energy. My perspective on this subject stems from my entry into academia as a clinician. I was a faculty member in the University of Michigan's Child Advocacy Law Clinic for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with the charge to create and implement an in-house clinic program. Over the past ten years, I have assisted in the …

Corporate Law As A Facilitator Of Self Governance, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Legal Duty Rule And Learning About Rules: A Case Study, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

Early in their law school careers, most students find that the notions they brought with them about law clash with the ideas encountered there. As a traditional first semester course, Contracts is one arena in which students experience most acutely that tension between expectation and reality.

Most new law students probably expect law school professors to spend more time teaching basic legal rules.[1] They anticipate the education in black letter law that is the distinctive trait of bar review courses. They are, therefore, surprised by their professors’ suggestion, whether explicit or implicit, that being a good lawyer is not a …

Clients Don't Take Sabbaticals: The Indispensable In-House Clinic And The Teaching Of Empathy, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

After almost 12 years in law teaching, I approached my first sabbatical with a single goal: to free myself from cases. At that time my clinic clients were primarily parents who were involved in family court proceedings in which they were trying to preserve their parental rights and get their children out of the foster care system. Such cases are emotionally draining for both the client and the lawyer. Thus, while I welcomed the chance to have a semester off from teaching and attending faculty and committee meetings, I felt that I needed a break from the demands of lawyering …

Protecting A Space For Creativity: The Role Of A Law School Dean In A Research University, Alfred C. Aman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Using Cases As Case Studies For Teaching Administrative Law, John S. Applegate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

A Greener Shade Of Crimson: Law And The Environment Alumni Forum, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

With the few minutes that I have, I want to respond to or elaborate on some of what was said and speak more directly about the development of the Environmental Law Program. Then I cannot resist commenting on some things which have not been said, but should be . . . In developing a program, one does not need to have gobs and gobs of environmental law courses. You need a core set of courses. You need a minimum of four courses - a minimum - taught by permanent faculty. You need an environmental law survey class. You need a …

The Canon(S) Of Constitutional Law: An Introduction, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Any discipline has a canon, a set of themes that organize the way in which people think about the discipline. Or, perhaps, any discipline has a number of competing canons. Is there a canon of constitutional law? A group of casebook authors met in December 1999 to discuss the choices they had made - what they had decided to include, what to exclude, what they regretted excluding (or including), what principles they used in developing their casebooks. Most of the authors were affiliated with law schools, but some had developed coursebooks for use in undergraduate political science and constitutional history …

(Baby) M Is For The Many Things: Why I Start With Baby M, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

For several years now I have begun my first-year contracts course with the 1988 New Jersey Supreme Court case In the Matter of Baby M. In this essay, I want to explain why. I offer the explanation in the spirit of modest proselytizing, recognizing that many of us already have a favored method or manner into the course: some introductory questions we pose before leaping into (or over) the introductions already provided by the editors of the many excellent casebooks available. But I have found that Baby M works extremely well in ways that others may want to consider. …

Law School On The Liffey: My Experiences At Trinity College, Dublin, Janet Sinder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Knowledge For Our Times: Rethinking Legal Knowledge And Legal Education, Ruth Buchanan, Marilyn Maccrimmon, Wes Pue

Articles & Book Chapters

The essays gathered for this symposium reflect a number of overlapping concerns about contemporary legal knowledge and education.

Though they are considerably diverse in focus and subject-matter, ranging from admissions to films to "marketing" of law faculties, each of these articles addresses aspects of legal education, the construction of legal knowledge and the character of what Ian Duncanson calls "the law discipline." Educational practice, knowledge and disciplinarity are thoroughly inter-related. The contributors to this volume are all acutely aware that, as educators and researchers, we both:

participate in the construction of legal knowledge (for the readers of learned journals, for …

Hard Choices: Thoughts For New Lawyers, David C. Vladeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Rarely do law schools challenge students to examine their assumptions about what being a lawyer really means. Seldom do law schools undertake a probing examination of the role that lawyers play in society and the choices that lawyers have to make in terms of how they spend their working lives. For example, how many of you have a clue about the basic facts of our profession? How many lawyers there are in the United States? What do they do? What percentage work for the government? For large law firms? For small firms? For legal services organizations? For public interest groups? …

Telling Stories In School: Using Case Studies And Stories To Teach Legal Ethics, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Foreword I will explore why we use stories and case studies (and whether stories and case studies are equal to the task) to examine ethical and moral issues in the practice of law and provide an introduction to the interesting tales which will enfold in this Symposium issue. I conclude with some thoughts about how stories and cases should be used to teach legal ethics.

Building Pediatric Law Careers: The University Of Michigan Law School Experience, Melissa Breger, Suellyn Scarnecchia, Frank E. Vandervort, Naomi Woloshin

Articles

There are several obstacles to training and supporting pediatric lawyers. Children are a relatively new group of clients and law schools have not traditionally provided pediatric training. The required training is particularly challenging to deliver because it is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring faculty and students to look outside of the law school to obtain necessary knowledge. The greatest obstacle to developing the careers of pediatric lawyers is the low pay and low prestige typically afforded children's lawyers. As a result, law students reasonably question the likelihood of developing a successful career in the field. The number of available jobs is limited …

Learning And Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services By Law Students, David L. Chambers, Cynthia F. Adcock

Articles

All lawyers' codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools …

Michigan's Minority Graduates In Practice: Answers To Methodological Queries, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams

Articles

Before making a few remarks in response to those who commented on our article (Lempert, Chambers, and Adams 2000), we would like to express our gratitude to the editors of Law and Social Inquiry for securing these commentaries and to the people who wrote them. The comments both highlight the potential uses to which our research and similar studies may be put and give us the opportunity to address methodological concerns and questions that other readers of our article may share with those who commented on it. The responses to our work are of two types. Professors Nelson, Payne, and …

Michigan's Minority Graduates In Practice: The River Runs Through Law School, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams

Articles

This paper reports the results of a 1997-98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by …

Bye-Bye Bluebook?, Pamela Lysaght, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

In March 2000, Aspen Law & Business published a new citation manual, the ALWD Citation Manual-A Professional System of Citation.' Developed mostly as a "restatement of citation," the ALWD Citation Manual not only provides the legal academy with a text that simplifies teaching legal citation, but also provides judges and lawyers with a helpful desktop reference book. This article explains why a new citation manual was created and highlights some of its significant features?

Linking The Visions, James Boyd White

Articles

It is a major tendency of legal studies in our time to focus upon questions of general social policy, with argument centered on which theory or methodology ought to determine such matters. My own attention has been differently focused, on the nature and quality of legal thoughts itself, and of legal expression. It is to these matters that the work I do with the humanities – literature, classics, philosophy, and translation – many speaks.