Law Commons^™

Researching Marijuana Law, Seth Quidachay-Swan

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article provides a brief overview of the current legal framework governing the regulation of marijuana at the federal and state levels in the United States. It also provides an overview of the state of Michigan’s current regulatory framework and resources for attorneys interested in learning more about marijuana regulation.

Research Resources For Michigan Criminal Law, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

Few areas of the law are as consequential to the personal lives of those involved as criminal law. The law can, and does, change quickly, and attorneys need to stay abreast of the latest developments to effectively represent their clients. Thankfully, modern government bodies publish current primary law (and many useful secondary sources) online. The sites outlined below will take users to reliable sources of Michigan criminal law and procedure.

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

Books Have The Power To Shape Public Policy, Barbara Mcquade

Michigan Law Review

In our digital information age, news and ideas come at us constantly and from every direction—newspapers, cable television, podcasts, online media, and more. It can be difficult to keep up with the fleeting and ephemeral news of the day.

Books, on the other hand, provide a source of enduring ideas. Books contain the researched hypotheses, the well-developed theories, and the fully formed arguments that outlast the news and analysis of the moment, preserved for the ages on the written page, to be discussed, admired, criticized, or supplanted by generations to come.

And books about the law, like the ones reviewed …

In Defense Of The Restatement Of Liability Insurance Law, Tom Baker, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

The importance of liability law to the American system of justice, and to the US economy in general, are well known. Somewhat less well known, at least among non-lawyers, is the corresponding centrality of liability insurance. For most non-contractual legal claims for damages that are brought against individuals or firms, there is some form of liability insurance coverage. Such coverage, provided by state-regulated insurance companies, ranges from auto and homeowners’ policies (sold to consumers throughout the country) to commercial general liability policies (sold to businesses of all sizes) to professional liability policies of various sorts (including Directors and Officers coverage …

Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of law libraries managing institutional repositories for their law schools. In 2011, there were some 30 law schools with such repositories; now, 80 of the top 100 law schools have their own or participate in a university-wide repository wherein the law school has an identifiable, school-specific collection or community. This article discusses a survey of the of the top 101 law schools, in hopes of facilitating an understanding of the breadth of material to be found in law school institutional repositories.

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Law Journals have been under heavy criticism for as long as we can remember. The criticisms come from all quarters, including judges, law professors, and even commentators at large. In an address at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference almost a decade ago, for example, Chief Justice Roberts complained about the “disconnect between the academy and the profession.” More pointedly, he continued, “[p]ick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was …

The Enduring Value Of Books Related To The Law: A Librarian's Perspective, Linda S. Maslow

Michigan Law Review

In the 1979 inaugural issue of the Michigan Law Review’s annual survey of books related to the law, Professor Cavers wrote an enthusiastic and hopeful introduction. He characterized the journal’s effort as a “bold innovation” that would benefit lawyers; law professors, both domestic and foreign; scholars in other disciplines, such as the social sciences; and the marketplace of ideas generally. As the annual survey approached its twentieth anniversary, Professor Schneider provided a fascinating, frank description of the Book Review issue’s origins during his tenure as the Michigan Law Review’s Editor- in-Chief. Happily, this annual Book Review issue continues to thrive. …

What Books On Law Should Be, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

I have thought it might be useful to our profession, and appropriate to a foreword to a collection of reviews of newly published books on law, to set forth some ideas on how books can best serve members of the different branches of the legal profession — specifically judges, practicing lawyers, law students, and academic lawyers — plus persons outside the legal profession who are interested in law. I am not interested in which already published books should be retained and which discarded, but in what type of book about law should be written from this day forward. I will …

Oh, The Treatise!, Richard A. Danner

Michigan Law Review

In his foreword to the Michigan Law Review's 2009 Survey of Books Related to the Law, my former Duke colleague Erwin Chemerinsky posed the question: "[W]hy should law professors write?" In answering, Erwin took as a starting point the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship that Judge Harry Edwards published in this journal in 1992. Judge Edwards indicted legal scholars for failing to engage the practical problems facing lawyers and judges, writing instead for the benefit of scholars in law and other disciplines rather than for their professional audiences. He characterized "practical" legal scholarship as both prescriptive (aiming to instruct attorneys, …

Tribute To Larry Ribstein, Barry E. Adler

Michigan Law Review

A law school job talk for an entry-level candidate is an opportunity for the presenter to put his or her ideas before a faculty in the best possible light. A bit of give-and-take is part of the drill, but the candidate can usually expect the talk to stay more or less on course. My own first job talk, though, given at George Mason University more years ago than I'd like to admit, was attended by the thoroughly exceptional Larry Ribstein and so did not unfold in the usual way.

The Vexations Of Aging From The Imagination (A Lot) And Life (A Little) Of Bill Miller, James J. White

Reviews

Bill Miller has done something quite uncommon, possibly singular: he has become a prominent law professor by writing books that have nothing to do with the law. His books do not even have the remote relation to law that books by philosophers or historians can claim. Having studied medieval history before law school and achieved law school tenure by teetering on the edge of law in his work on Icelandic sagas, Miller jumped the fence completely in his books The Mystery of Courage, The Anatomy of Disgust, and Faking It. He has never returned. Presumably, this Review earned a place …

What Ed Cooper Has Taught Me About The Realities And Complexities Of Appellate Jurisdiction And Procedure, Catherine T. Struve

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this brief essay, I will describe some of what I have learned from Ed Cooper as a fellow participant in the rulemaking process and as a coauthor of two volumes of his Federal Practice and Procedure treatise. To describe everything that Ed has taught me would require much more than the length of this essay. So instead, I will try to offer some representative examples-or, as Ed might say, some "sketches." Because others will discuss Ed's expert guidance of the Rules Committees' consideration of key issues concerning the Civil Rules, my discussion of Ed's scholarship and reporting work will …

Issues And Trends In Collection Development For East Asia Legal Materials, Joostaek Lee, Xiaomeng Zhang, Keiko Okuhara, Evelyn Ma

Law Librarian Scholarship

The authors delineate the general policy and guidelines for developing foreign and transnational law collections in U.S. law libraries, and they analyze factors that shape East Asian collections, such as law libraries’ preservation and digitization efforts and their related cost-efficiency, and the availability and quality of English translations. The authors then discuss the main sources for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese law.

Erratum, Fred R. Shapiro, Michelle Pearse

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Fred R. Shapiro and Michelle Pearse's essay The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, 110 MICH. L. REV. 1483 (2012), omitted an article: Owen M. Fiss, Groups and the Equal Protection Clause, 5 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 107 (1976). Professor Fiss's article should have been listed in 72nd place (with 729 citations) in Table I, Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time. Professor Fiss's article fell into the category of articles published in nonlegal journals with over 50 percent of the citations to them occurring in legal journals. See Shapiro & Pearse, supra, at 1487-88. This category by its …

Restoring Restitution To The Canon, Douglas Laycock

Michigan Law Review

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment brings clarity and light to an area of law long shrouded in fogs that linger from an earlier era of the legal system. It makes an important body of law once again accessible to lawyers and judges. This new Restatement should be on every litigator's bookshelf, and a broad set of transactional lawyers and legal academics would also do well to become familiar with it. Credit for this Restatement goes to its Reporter, Professor Andrew Kull. Of course his work benefited from the elaborate processes of the American Law Institute, with every …

Old Habits Die Hard: Disengaging From The Bluebook, Mark Garibyan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Incoming first-year law students dread many aspects of what lies ahead: the cold calls, the challenging course load, and the general stress that is associated with starting a new phase in one’s life. Most students, however, do not expect that the Bluebook—the citation system used ubiquitously throughout the legal landscape—will inflict “more pain” on them “than any other publication in legal history.” This pain might be a shock to many who are accustomed to the simpler systems utilized in other academic fields. A citation itself is, after all, merely a reference; it is “neither scholarship nor analysis.” Preferably, a system …

Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In this Article, Professor Waggoner, newly retired, provides a retrospective on his career in law reform. He was inspired to write the Article by a number of articles by law professors explaining why they write. He contrasts law-reform work with law-review writing, pointing out that the work product of a law-reform reporter is directed to duly constituted law-making authorities. He notes that before getting into the law-reform business, he had authored or co-authored law review articles that advocated reform, but he also notes that those articles did not move the law a whit. The articles did, however, lead to his …

The Quest For A Sustainable Future And The Dawn Of A New Journal At Michigan Law, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. It must have seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the environmental …

Craig Callen: Tributes From The Evidence Community, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

At the wonderful memorial service for Craig Callen held at MSU shortly after his death in April, I had the honor, by reason of proximity, to appear in effect as the representative of nationwide, and even worldwide, community of scholars that has felt his death very deeply. I am grateful for the opportunity to perform this same function in print.

Beating The Bluebook Blues: A Response To Judge Posner, Stephen M. Darrow, Jonathan J. Darrow

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Judge Richard A. Posner's recent critique (The Bluebook Blues) of the maddening hypertrophy of The Bluebook is surely a refreshing voice of sanity for the multitudes of law students and legal professionals who have had occasion to consult it. Even at Harvard Law School, the home of its founding institutional sponsor, The Bluebook's labyrinthine rules annually aggravate a fresh crop of otherwise remarkably stoic future lawyers. But while many of Posner's observations regarding The Bluebook are astute, we posit that both form and uniformity are important for citations, and we suggest citation-formatting software as a means of maximizing the utility …

Paper Tigers: Rethinking The Relationship Between Copyright And Scholarly Publishing, Alissa Centivany

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Discontent is growing in academia over the practices of the proprietary scholarly publishing industry. Scholars and universities criticize the expensive subscription fees, restrictive access policies, and copyright assignment requirements of many journals. These practices seem fundamentally unfair given that the industries' two main inputs-articles and peer-review-are provided to it free of charge. Furthermore, while many publishers continue to enjoy substantial profit margins, many elite university libraries have been forced to triage their collections, choosing between purchasing monographs or subscribing to journals, or in some cases, doing away with "non-essential" materials altogether. The situation is even more dire for non-elite schools, …

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 2011-2012, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 2010-2011, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

Setting The Stage: A Quick Glance Back At The Journal's History, Julia L. Ernst

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This symposium, organized by the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, explored several cutting-edge topics related to its over-arching theme, "Rhetoric & Relevance: An Investigation into the Present and Future of Feminist Legal Theory." When the journal editors invited me to provide a few opening remarks, they informed me that: the goal of this symposium is to have a series of discussions about current happenings in the field of feminist legal scholarship, so that we may start to answer the question, "What's next?" These discussions will take place in the form of panels that focus on particular areas of the …

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 2009-2010, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

John Henry Wigmore, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

Wigmore, John Henry (1863-1943). Law professor and dean. Wigmore was born and reared in San Francisco. His parents were both immigrants, his mother from England and his father, of English heritage, from Ireland. Harry, as he was known familiarly, was the oldest and most favored of his extraordinarily doting mother's seven children. The family was prosperous - his father had an importing business - and Harry was educated principally in private schools. He then attended Harvard College, prompting the mother to move the family to Massachusetts to be close to him. After graduating in 1883, he spent a brief interlude …

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 08/09, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

A Guide To Searching Cyberspace Law Online, Jennifer L. Selby

Law Librarian Scholarship

Cyberspace law is an umbrella term that touches on and encompasses many different areas of the law, including Internet, intellectual property, cybercrime, e-commerce, and privacy, among others. Cyberspace law includes aspects of United States law, in addition to foreign, comparative, and international law.1 Today, legal researchers in cyberspace law can enhance their search capabilities with web-based resources, including primary and secondary materials. Many of the resources discussed here are available freely on the Internet. For those resources that are licensed and networked, researchers may access them only at subscribing law libraries, and not remotely.2

Tactics And Terms In The Negotiation Of Electronic Resource Licenses, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This chapter introduces the reader to the realm of electronic resource license agreements. It provides the reader with an overview of basic contract law as it relates to electronic resource licensing. The chapter then discusses the electronic resource license negotiation process as well as license agreement term clauses. The aim of this chapter is to provide librarians with an understanding of basic licensing concepts and language in order to aid librarians in the review and negotiation of their own license agreements. The author hopes to impart lessons and tips he has learned in reviewing and negotiating license agreements with a …