Legal Profession Commons^™

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Language Matters, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 163 (2000), Jane B. Baron

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Riddikulus!: Tenure-Track Legal Writing Faculty And The Boggart In The Wardrobe, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley compares myths to boggarts in this examination of the reasons schools cite when explaining their lack of tenure-track positions for legal writing faculty. These boggarts are the living myths that pop out and whisper in faculty ears whenever someone suggests that law schools should create tenure-track - or even permanent - faculty positions in legal writing. Although some faculties have defeated these boggarts, they are still out there, popping out not from under the bed or from behind the closet door, but at lunch in the faculty lounge, after the committee meeting, and during the conversation in the …

Climb High: High Altitude Mountaineering Lessons For Librarians, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

No abstract provided.

Colorado Association Of Law Libraries, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Education, Professionalism, And The Public Interest, Alfred C. Aman Jr.

Alfred Aman Jr. (1991-2002)

No abstract provided.

Foreword, Jeffrey Rosen

Michigan Law Review

America now is a society addicted to legalism that has lost its faith in legal argument. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was only the most visible manifestation of this paradox. Both Democrats and Republicans professed a rhetorical commitment to the rule of law while revealing a deep pessimism about the ability of courts, legislatures, or even citizens to transcend their biases and to converge, through deliberation, on impartial and democratically acceptable outcomes. The simplistic Supreme Court decisions that precipitated the impeachment - in particular, Morrison v. Olson,1 upholding the Independent Counsel law, and Jones v. Clinton,2 denying the President temporary …

Atticus Finch, In Context, Randolph N. Stone

Michigan Law Review

One summer night in 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, was abducted by two white men, beaten, and shot; his body was tied to a fan from a cotton gin and thrown in a river. Emmett's "crime": being black and allegedly whistling at a white woman. Through the early 1970s, hundreds of black men had been "legally" executed after being convicted, usually by all white juries or white judges, of sexually assaulting white women; hundreds more were lynched and otherwise extrajudicially executed. This is the historical context of white supremacy essentially ignored by Professor Lubet …

Reply To Comments On Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet

Michigan Law Review

Reconstructing Atticus Finch was intended to be provocative, so I am not surprised at the strength of the responses. Neither should I be surprised by the continuing reverence engendered by the fictional Atticus Finch; as I pointed out in my original essay, he is our moral archetype. Indeed, it was the accepted nobility of the character that made my question worth asking in the first place. What if Mayella had been attacked by Tom Robinson? Would Atticus still be a hero? To ask that question about a lesser figure would inevitably invite stock responses. Champions of the adversary system would …

Comment On Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson

Michigan Law Review

Professor Lubet has joined a growing list of revisionists who question Atticus's standing as the paragon of lawyerly virtue.1 But Professor Lubet takes revisionism in a distinctly postmodern direction, if not to a radically new level. Atticus's previous critics have wondered how he could have overlooked, perhaps even condoned, the pervasive racism, sexism, and classism of the Depression-era South. They have even occasionally censured his paternalism toward his pro bono client, the working-class black rape defendant Tom Robinson. But they have never questioned either Tom's claim of innocence or the propriety of Atticus's advocacy of that claim. Professor Lubet questions …

Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet

Michigan Law Review

Atticus Finch. No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or public perception of the legal profession than the hero of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. For nearly four decades, the name of Atticus Finch has been invoked to defend and inspire lawyers, to rebut lawyer jokes, and to justify (and fine-tune) the adversary system. Lawyers are greedy. What about Atticus Finch? Lawyers only serve the rich. Not Atticus Finch. Professionalism is a lost ideal. Remember Atticus Finch. In the unreconstructed Maycomb, Alabama of the 1930s, Atticus was willing to risk his social standing, professional reputation, and …

Response To Steven Lubet: A Reaction: "Stand Up, Your Father [A Lawyer] Is Passing", Burnele V. Powell

Michigan Law Review

Professor Steven Lubet's review examines in the lawyering context the truth of Due de La Rochefoucauld's observation that "[o]ur virtues are mostly but vices in disguise." His question - one going to the very heart of what lawyering is about - asks readers of To Kill a Mockingbird whether they would be equally prepared to accept the fictional Atticus Fmch as the personification of the good lawyer if his black client, defendant Tom Robinson, actually committed the rape of the white woman, Mayella Ewell, for which he was charged. If Robinson was a rapist, how then does one square Atticus's …

Moral Icons: A Comment On Steven Lubet's Reconstructing Atticus Finch, William H. Simon

Michigan Law Review

Atticus Finch's conduct would have been justified by the bar's conventional norms even if he had known Tom Robinson to be guilty. That fact, however, is not the source of the admiration for him that To Kill a Mockingbird has induced in so many readers. That admiration depends on the clear premise of the novel that Finch plausibly believes that Tom Robinson is innocent. Thus, the bar's invocation of Finch as a sympathetic illustration of its norms is misleading. The ethics of the novel are quite different from those of the bar. Steven Lubet does a good job of showing …

Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response To Professor Lubet, Ann Althouse

Michigan Law Review

In one of her childishly obtuse moments, Scout, the narrator of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, denies that her father Atticus Finch is any sort of proper example of how a lawyer ought to act when cross-examining a witness. The prosecutor's crossexamination of the accused Tom Robinson has moved her friend Dill to tears: "I couldn't stand . . . [t]hat old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him _" Scout, who has taken her friend out of the courtroom, explains: "Dill, that's his job . . . . He's supposed to act that way." Atticus, …

Doing Well & Doing Good: The Careers Of Minority And White Graduates Of The University Of Michigan Law School, 1970 - 1996, David L. Chambers, Richard O. Lempert, Terry K. Adams

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

In the last few yearsm affirmative action in higher education has faced increasing legal scrutiny, in part because of doubts about the kinds of graduates these programs produce. A few years ago, we and some of our colleagues at Michigan started asking whether we could learn the answers to these questions about the careers of our graduates. The Law School already possessed considerable information about our minority graduates - from the surveys we have conducted each year for over 30 years of our alumni five and 15 years after graduation. But, while the annual survey asks many questions about careers …

Confrontation Confronted, Richard D. Friedman, Margaret A. Berger, Steven R. Shapiro

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following article is an edited version of the amicus curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1998, in the case of Benjamin Lee Lilly v. Commonwealth of Virginia(No.98-5881). "This case raises important questions about the confrontation clause, which has been a vital ingredient of the fair trial right for hundreds of years," Professor Richard Friedman and his co-authors say. "In particular, this case presents the Court with an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between the confrontation clause and the law of hearsay." On June 10 the Court handed down a decision …

Competent Legal Writing - A Lawyer's Professional Responsibility, Debra R. Cohen

Journal Articles

The legal profession is constantly evolving to keep pace with our increasingly complex society.' Today, the legal profession "is larger and more diverse than ever before." Despite this transformation, "the law has remained a single profession identified with a perceived common body of learning, skills and values." This common body of learning, skills, and values constitutes the fundamental elements of competent representation. Writing is one of the essential skills of competent representation.

"Law is a profession of words." Lawyers use words, both written and oral, in a wide array of contexts-to advise, to advocate, to elicit information, to establish legal …

Three's A Crowd: Law, Literature, And Truth, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Closing One Gap But Opening Another?: A Response To Dean Perritt And Comments On The Internet, Law Schools, And Legal Education, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction And Dedication, J. Thomas Sullivan

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, introduction

Meet My Mentors -- Janet Wallin And Caroline Heriot, Edmund P. Edmonds

Journal Articles

In this article, Dean Ed Edmonds describes his relationship with two people who mentored him in his career as a legal librarian.

Foreword: Issues Affecting Notarial Law And Policy, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 647 (1998), Robert Gilbert Johnson

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Right To Participate, Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela S. Karlan, Richard H. Pildes

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is excerpted and adapted from The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process, © The Foundation Press, Inc., Westbury, NY (1998). Publication is by permission.

Constitutions are often viewed today as constraints on majoritarian power in the service of minority interests. But constitutional ground rules also create the possibility of ongoing democratic self-government; constitutions establish relatively stable and non-negotiable precommitments that enable generally accepted structures of political competition to emerge and endure.

Despite the centrality of this role for the American Constitution , however, there is paradoxically little that the text or its history offers …

A Critique Of The Proposed Tobacco Resolution And A Suggested Alternative, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is adapted from testimony presented to the Senate Democratic Task Force on Tobacco in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9 1997, which in turn is based on the authors' forthcoming article, "The Costs of Cigarettes: The Economic Case for Ex Post Incentive-based Regulation," 107 Yale Law Journal (March 1998)

If the goal of cigarette regulation is either to reduce substantially the public health problem created by cigarette smoking or to allocate the costs of smoking more equitably, there are significantly better alternatives to the regulatory regime than would be created by the state attorneys general's Proposed Tobacco Resolution. …

Upstream Patents = Downstream Bottlenecks, Michael A. Heller, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following text is excerpted from "Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research" and is reprinted with permission from 280 Science 698-701 (May 1998). © 1998 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Thirty years ago in Science, Garrett Hardin introduced the metaphor "tragedy of the commons" to help explain overpopulation, air pollution, and species extinction. People often overuse resources they own in common because they have no incentive to conserve. Today, Hardin's metaphor is central to debates in economics, law, and science and powerful justification for privatizing commons property. While the metaphor highlights the cost of overuse …

Shall - Take No. 2, Debra R. Cohen

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Ethics On The Web: An Annotated Bibliography Of Legal Ethics Material On The Internet, 28 Stetson L. Rev. 369 (1998), Darby Dickerson

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Art Of The Fact: An Afternoon Colloquy In A Tentative Key, Jethro K. Lieberman

Books

No abstract provided.

Faculty Highlights

Alfred Aman Jr. (1991-2002)

No abstract provided.

Going To Trial: A Rare Throw Of The Die, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Few of the suits that are filed continue to trial, but some plaintiffs and defendants find their interests served best by going to trial.

This essay is adapted from "Don’t Try: Civil Jury Verdicts in a System Geared to Settlement," appearing in 44 UCLA Law Review 1 (1996). Publication is by permission. A complete, fully cited version is available from the editor of Law Quadrangle Notes.

If it is true, as we often hear, that we are one of the most litigious societies on earth, it is because of our propensity to sue, not our affinity for trials. …