Law Commons^™

Exemplary Legal Writing 2020: Four Recommendations, Jed S. Rakoff, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

For some years, John Coffee of the Columbia Law School, one of the country’s leading experts on corporate and securities law, has been critical of the government’s failure to effectively prosecute corporate crime. In this book, Coffee both propounds a general theory of why such criminality is rarely prosecuted in a meaningful way, and also offers some creative solutions to such underenforcement.

Justice Kennedy's Prose – Style And Substance, Eric Segall, Eric Berger, Michael C. Dorf, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement in June 2018 sent shockwaves throughout America. After Justice Sandra Day O'Connor left the Court in 2005, Justice Kennedy became the Court's all-important swing vote in virtually every important area of constitutional law. His views on affirmative action, abortion, campaign finance reform, free speech, and the separation of church and state (among many other constitutional issues) were the ones that mattered the most among the Justices. Lawyers prepared arguments and filed briefs in the Supreme Court for the main purpose of persuading Justice Kennedy to rule for their clients. He was, quite simply, the …

The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Lynnise Pantin. I teach at New York Law School, and my talk today focuses on integrating transactional skills into the first-year curriculum.

As a first premise, the law school curriculum is dominated by litigation oriented skills, and I can argue that there is a litigation bias that is pervasive in legal education. I am hoping that, by engaging with those of you who teach first year students, we can start to talk about creating and developing transactional skills within a context that is already there in the first-year curriculum.