Legal Profession Commons^™

Enhancing The Effectiveness Of Your Legal Writing, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

This article focuses on areas where busy practitioners can aspire for plain English and not only improve their writing but possibly avoid a few pitfalls. As Justice Brandeis once remarked, "There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting" So here are three areas to focus on as you rewrite: minimizing initialisms, acronyms, and defined terms; losing legal jargon and cutting clutter; and balancing legal terms and precision.

A Call For Strengthening The Role Of Comparative Legal Analysis In The United States, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay highlights the importance of comparative legal analysis with particular emphasis on the role that this methodology could play for intellectual property scholarship in the United States. In particular, this Essay suggests that U.S. scholars could consider turning with more frequency to comparative legal analysis as an additional methodology to use in their research. Yet, the objective of this Essay is not to suggest that U.S. scholars should engage in comparative legal analysis in lieu of other types of research methodologies. Instead, this Essay simply supports that comparative legal analysis could play a larger role compared to the one …

Law Library Blog (October 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Legal Research Plan And The Research Log: An Examination Of The Role Of The Research Plan And Research Log In The Research Process, Caroline L. Osborne

Law Faculty Scholarship

This paper reviews the current status of the concept of the legal research plan. It summarizes the basic elements of the legal research plan, reviews the current literature and recommends a design of a plan for use in first year legal research programs and by novice researchers. Also, it considers the use of the research log in the research process.

Law Library Blog (September 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Gap: Transitioning Law School Legal Writing Skills To Practicing Law, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Rwu Law Adds Skills Programs And Faculty 8/15/2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: Rwu Law Continues To Add Skills Programs And Faculty 08/12/2016, Michael Yelnosky

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (August 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Prospects For Change: The Question Of Justice In A Law & Society Framework, Michael W. Raphael

Graduate Student Publications and Research

What is the law and society framework and where has it gotten us? A student in a classroom might raise their hand and offer "understanding legal pluralism" as a possible answer. However, the conceptual problem with legal pluralism is the coexistence of potentially conflicting bases of justification. Given this, desiring to understand how the law shapes the structural underpinnings of whichever "legal" phenomena and its "ongoing transformation", is nevertheless an immense achievement that stops short of its underlying goal – the achievement of human dignity through human rights. For example, to talk about 'multi-stakeholder consultations' and other pithy phrases that …

Dean's Desk: New Faculty Continue Legacy Of Legal Scholarship, Austen Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

No abstract provided.

Nebraska Court Opinions Move Online Only, Marcia L. Dority Baker, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library

Change has come to the state of Nebraska in a digital way. Beginning January 1, 2016, the official opinions of the Nebraska Supreme Court and the Nebraska Court of Appeals are available online only, a change which improves users’ ability to search these opinions. Now users can search all Nebraska Supreme Court opinions from 1871 through the present day and all Nebraska Court of Appeals opinions since its creation in 1992. Prior to this change, opinions were made available in print and the current opinions were available on the Court’s website. Both the public and legal community can access court …

Hitting The Mark? Aall Legal Research Competencies: From Classroom To Practice, Gail A. Partin, Sally H. Wise

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (February 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

"No Country For Old Men": Junior Associates And The Real-World Practice Of Law, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Law schools are designed to teach students about the doctrine of law and to help them prepare their skills to practice law. There are some practical aspects of law practice, though, that are rarely if ever discussed in law school. Perhaps this is because of an assumption that law firms will make these issues clear to the students they hire as associates, or perhaps it is because of a belief that such information has no place in the curriculum of an academic institution.

Whatever the reason, this is information law students should have as they begin to think about where …

The Influence Of Algorithms: The Importance Of Tracking Technology As Legal Educators, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Good Old-Fashioned Editing, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

While not perfect, the spelling and grammar review features of word processing software can prove good editing tools. Similarly, find and replace features can help ferret out any lurking malapropisms. These searches can avert the potential embarrassment of quoting a "statue" in the Idaho Code in a brief filed in "Canon County' However, electronic editing does not supplant the good old-fashioned printing-a-fresh-draft- and-reading-keenly style of editing. This article focuses on a few tips to optimize the effectiveness of editing text in print.

From The Editor, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Finishing The Job Of Legal Education Reform, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Beazley advocates for the extension of tenure to skills faculty for the good of law faculty and of legal education. She argues that extending tenure to legal writing and other skills faculty will help to advance the goals of education reform in a variety of ways. First, equalizing the power of skills faculty will allow law schools to get the full benefit of their teaching and scholarship, a benefit that is currently blunted by ignorance and bias. Second, fair treatment of skills faculty will advance the values of equality, diversity, and inclusion: law students will benefit …

Writing For A Mind At Work: Appellate Advocacy And The Science Of Digital Reading, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley explores the future implications to appellate advocacy as we move into the digital age. Understanding how that digital world affects legal reading is vital to understanding the future of appellate advocacy. Lawyers need to understand some of the science of how people read and interact with the written word; unfortunately, we have been slow to grasp the importance of this science. She defines and explains the concepts of "Active Readers" and "Knowledge Work." She then addresses some of the issues that arise as active readers transition from paper to digital platforms. Professor Beazley concludes by describing some of …

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

Articles

This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

Yellow Flag Fever: Describing Negative Legal Precedent In Citators, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …

Joseph Story, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Joseph Story (1779-1845) was one of the greatest and most influential American lawyers of all time. Both as a Supreme Court Justice and as a professor at Harvard Law School, his work and thought were, and still are, of great importance. Today’s private international law would look different without him, both in the United States and in the rest of the world. At the same time, his approach to the field cannot be properly understood unless placed within his broader work on law, and the specific American background against which it was developed.

The Contested Value Of Normative Legal Scholarship, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal scholarship, under attack from critics both inside and outside the legal academy, is on the horns of a “normativity” dilemma. To some critics, legal scholarship isn’t scholarship, because it’s too normative; while to others, it may be scholarship, but it’s not legal because it’s not normative enough.

In this article, I address one side of this issue, what I call the anti-normativity complaint: to wit, that legal scholarship is somehow not “true scholarship” because so much of it is overtly normative. Legal scholarship, according to this strand of criticism, isn’t true scholarship because of the dominance of “ought” …