Law Commons^™

An Arrow To The Heart: The Love And Death Of Postmodern Legal Scholarship, Stephen M. Feldman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Modernist legal writers, including Dennis Arrow in his well-known Pomobabble article, commonly criticize postmodern legal scholars for being muddle-headed nihilistic thinkers who write indecipherable jargon-filled nonsense and lack political convictions. Professor Feldman responds to these and other related criticisms and, in doing so, explains some key components of postmodernism. For instance, he describes how the pervasiveness of postmodern culture infuses legal scholarship with certain postmodern themes. Ironically, then, even the most vehement critics, like Arrow, display a surprising if unwitting affinity for postmodernism. Finally, in order to deflect precipitate denunciations of postmodernism, Professor Feldman suggests a refinement of terms, dividing …

Footnotes As Product Differentiation, Arthur D. Austin

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Professor Fred Rodell announced his first Goodbye to Law Reviews in 1936, he established the accepted wisdom for law review criticism. Rodell complained that law review literature had two serious defects-style and content. Subsequent criticism has been persistently harsh; the common theme is that "[the extraordinary proliferation of law reviews, most of them student edited and all but a handful very erratic in quality, has been harmful for the nature, evaluation, and accessibility of legal scholarship."

Having exhausted complaints on substance, critics uncovered another mischievous threat. They discovered that articles are Typhoid Marys of an insidious plague-footnotes. Second-rate style …

Thinking (By Writing) About Legal Writing, Philip C. Kissam

Vanderbilt Law Review

The practice of law requires a good amount of original writing,and it is a commonplace today that much of this writing is done rather poorly. Charles Fried, the United States Solicitor General,has implied that much legal writing, especially in appellate briefs,is "turgid and boring."' John Nowak, a Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, has reiterated Fred Rodell's classic complaint that the writing in law reviews lacks both style and substance. More fundamentally, Steven Stark, in his Harvard Law Review comment, has argued that the style and substance of most legal writing are flawed by lawyers' ideological commitments to …

Choosing Law Clerks In Massachusetts, Robert Braucher

Vanderbilt Law Review

About the summer of 1875" Chief Justice Horace Gray of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts "began a practice, which he continued until the end of his judicial career, of employing a young graduate of the Harvard Law School as a secretary. At first he paid the expense of this from his own purse, but before he had been many years at Washington" as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States "the Government provided for the appointment of a clerk for each of the justices of the Supreme Court. His colleagues generally appointed as their clerks stenographers …

The End Of Empire, Fred D. Schneider

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Within the space of a generation, the British Empire has disintegrated in a way that appears extraordinary, even in retrospect. "How marvelous it all is," Lord Rosebery exclaimed at the end of the nineteenth century. If marvelous in its growth, the Empire has been no less significant in the manner of its passing.

The decline of great empires exerts a peculiar fascination over the mind of the historian; indeed, more has been written about the fall of Rome than about the death of any other political entity. Diverse and contradictory theories are advanced to explain a complex historical phenomenon, and …

Headnotes, Journal Editor

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This issue marks the close of the first year for the Vanderbilt International. What it will become in the future is anyone's guess with General Hershey threatening a drastic reduction in the number of law students next year. In the long run, however, the publication can probably fill a very useful role as either an interdisciplinary magazine with a legal bias or as a law journal with an interdisciplinary bent. The former goal has been, by choice and necessity, the object of this year's Editors. Next year's staff will do as they like.

Regardless of emphasis, however, the increasing importance …

Edmund M. Morgan, Felix Frankfurter

Vanderbilt Law Review

On a rough estimate, there were some two hundred items of every variety of legal writing: text books, case books, an unpretentious but wise little volume on the Introduction to the Study of Law, the successive stages of the Code of Evidence of the American Law Institute, essays scattered in dozens of law reviews, as well as those contained between book covers, like his Carpentier Lectures, book reviews, surveys of developments in the law both in the Nation and latterly in Tennessee. He has not been a one-subject scholar. But in one field, Evidence,he has become the contemporary master. History …

Book Reviews, James B. Earle, J. Allen Smith, Samuel E. Stumpf, Ingram Bloch, J. Raymond Denney

Vanderbilt Law Review

Book Reviews

The Oppenheimer Case: The Trial of a Security System

By Charles P. Curtis

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Pp. xi, 281. $4.00

reviewer: Ingram Bloch

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Trial Tactics and Methods

By Robert E. Keeton

New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1954. Pp. xxiv, 438. $6.65

reviewer: J. Raymond Denney

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Military Law under the Uniform Code of Military Justice

By William B. Aycock and Seymour W. Wurfel

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Pp. xviii, 430.

reviewer: James B. Earle

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Why Johnny Can't Read

By Rudolf Flesch

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955. Pp. ix, …

Legal Writing On Statutory Construction, Paul H. Sanders, John W. Wade

Vanderbilt Law Review

This review does not purport to provide a complete critique of the various works in the field of Statutory Construction. It is not directed primarily to the specialist. Instead, it is intended to bring together for the benefit of the general practitioner the various books and other writings on the subject and thus amounts essentially to a bibliography. But an effort has been made to suggest the approach of the longer works and to estimate in some measure their value. Thus this symposium on the subject of Statutory Construction can be rounded out by providing convenient reference to other writings …