Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation And America's Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion To Bibliographical Orthodoxy And The Constriction Of Open And Equal Access To The Law, Ian Gallacher

ExpressO

This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system’s devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals – The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual – has on open access to the law.

In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

Economic Analysis Of Law And Economics, Oren Gazal-Ayal

ExpressO

The academic world is wonderful. Like few other professionals, we can choose what we want to do and what questions we think are important, which in our line of work means choosing what topics we want to research. But what influences our choices? This paper examines what drives scholars to select Law and Economics (L&E) as a topic for research. It does so by implementing the methodology of many L&E papers – by assuming that regulation and incentives matter.

Legal scholars face very different academic incentives in different parts of the world. In some countries, the academic standards for appointment, …

Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year, Michael A. Millemann, Steven D. Schwinn

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, the co-authors argue that legal research and writing (LRW) teachers should use actual legal work to generate assignments. They recommend that clinical and LRW teachers work together to design, co-teach, and evaluate such courses. They describe two experimental courses they developed together and co-taught to support and clarify their arguments. They contend that actual legal work motivates students to learn the basic skills of research, analysis and writing, and thus helps to accomplish the primary goals of LRW courses. It also helps students to explore new dimensions of basic skills, including those related to the development and …

Caveat Blogger: Blogging And The Flight From Scholarship, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These comments were delivered to the “Symposium on Bloggership” held at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006. Professor Randy Barnett discusses the pros and cons of blogging by legal scholars.

Maccrate (In)Action: The Case For Enhancing The Upper-Level Writing Requirement In Law Schools, Kenneth D. Chestek

ExpressO

In 2001, the American Bar Association amended the Standards for Accreditation of Law Schools to require, for the first time, a “rigorous writing experience after the first year.” During the summer of 2004 the author conducted a nationwide survey to determine how law schools responded to this change. The author found that most schools did little more than to require students to take at least one course which was evaluated by means of an academic paper rather than an examination. The author concludes that this is probably not the response the ABA had hoped for, but suggests that a 2005 …

Partnering With Decision Makers In Your Institution, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Articles

What follows is a simplified introduction to legal argument. It is concerned with the scheme of argument and with certain primary definitions and assumptions commonly used in legal opinions and analysis. This discussion is not exhaustive of all the forms of legal argument nor of the techniques of argument you will see and use this year. It is merely an attempt to introduce some commonly used tools in legal argument. It starts, as do most of your first-year courses, with the techniques of the common-law method and then proceeds to build statutory, regulatory, and constitutional sources of law into the …

Teaching As Art Form - Review Of The Elements Of Teaching, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The authors of this gem of a book—both retired college teachers who gave their professional lifetimes to teaching—write simply and passionately about what it takes to be an effective teacher, and manage to reduce the key aspects of a complex process down to nine primary elements. In so doing, they provide not only a road map of aspiration for the new teacher, but also signposts of inspiration for the experienced teacher.

Teach The Children Well: Incorporating Cultural Literacy Into The Law School Learning Experience, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an examination of what and how we teach in law school. Much attention has been given to the concept of the Socratic Method and whether teaching in this manner "hides the ball" from students. Rather than focusing on whether the ball is hidden, my work shall focus on whether students know what the ball is in the first place.

Trademark Searching Tools And Strategies: Questions For The New Millennium, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

The intent of this discussion is to raise questions about trademark searching which will be discussed in future issues of IDEA. I will lead you through the questions raised by my journey through primarily legal literature in treatises and periodicals on the Lexis and Westlaw platforms.

Keeping Up To Date With Ip News Services And Blogs: Drowning In A Sea Of Sameness?, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

It seems like so many IP related Websites you visit invite you to join their free email list to keep you up to date. Sources span a wide spectrum including governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, consulting services, law firms, commercial publishers and more. These sources span the spectrum from free, to low fee to premium pricing. With all of this information overload and choices, how do you differentiate and choose news sources?

The goals of this article are twofold. Goal one is to present a survey of types and categories of IP news tools available to IP researchers. Since …

Legal Writing Programs And Professionalism: Legal Writing Professors Can Join The Academic Club, James M. Boland

St. Thomas Law Review

Sociological jurisprudence has been a major factor in legal interpretive schemes for over a century, but this has not been reflected in most legal writing programs. These programs must produce legal writers who not only are competent writers, but are also competent legal theorists who know the difference between classical rule-based reasoning and modem interpretive methods. Concomitantly, legal writing professors must produce scholarship that reflects the diversity of these more complex schemes, rather than just writing about writing. This article will first describe the current condition of legal writing programs, and then suggest changes that more thoroughly introduce students to …

As A Last Resort, Ask The Students: What They Say Makes Someone An Effective Law Teacher, James B. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fundamental Dimensions Of Law And Legal Education: An Historical Framework - A History Of U.S. Legal Education Phase I: From The Founding Of The Republic Until The 1860s, 39 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1041 (2006), Mark L. Jones

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Orthodoxy Of Format: Some Sketches On Legal Scholarship, William Aceves, James Cooper, Alejandro Gonzalez, Pedro Egana Marshall

Faculty Scholarship

The idea that legal scholarship should include visual elements is not a new one. Early student work blazed a trail some thirty years ago. More recent contributions have been produced by scholars such as Keith Aoki. And, in 2006, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University published a comic book addressing copyright law and the fair use doctrine.

Despite these efforts, there does not appear to be any systematic attempt to use graphic art in legal scholarship. This project makes such an appeal. It challenges the conventional format for legal scholarship that has been used …

Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year, 12 Clinical L. Rev. 441 (2006), Steven D. Schwinn, Michael Millemann

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In this article, the co-authors argue that legal research and writing (LRW) teachers should use actual legal work to generate assignments. They recommend that clinical and LRW teachers work together to design, co-teach, and evaluate such courses.

They describe two experimental courses they developed together and co-taught to support and clarify their arguments. They contend that actual legal work motivates students to learn the basic skills of research, analysis and writing, and thus helps to accomplish the primary goals of LRW courses. It also helps students to explore new dimensions of basic skills, including those related to the development and …

Lawyers And Learning: A Metacognitive Approach To Legal Education, 13 Widener L. Rev. 33 (2006), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Chilling Of Discourse, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

I argue that the key consequence of the collectives of multicultural, postmodernists, radical feminists, critical race activists, sexuality advocates and others working for radical change is not only the politicization of knowledge in what is after all a realm of politics we call law, but the incoherence of knowledge and the loss of the quality and integrity of our pursuit of knowledge through scholarship. One result is that much of the scholarship and teaching found in the humane and political or noncumulative disciplines such as law are forms of self-interested propaganda in which honesty is muted or excluded and truth-seeking …

Download It While It's Hot: Open Access And Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article analyzes the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today's world of peer reviews to tomorrow's world of open access legal blogs. This shift is occurring in three dimensions. First, legal scholarship is moving from the long form (treatises and law review articles) to the short form (very short articles, blog posts, and online collaborations). Second, a regime of exclusive rights is giving way to a regime of open access. Third, intermediaries (law school editorial boards, peer-reviewed journals) are being supplemented by disintermediated forms (papers on the Internet, blogs). Blogs and internet conversations …

The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. Recently, we have seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a …

The Law Is Not The Case: Incorporating Empirical Methods Into The Culture Of Case Analysis, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

While I consider case analysis in the context of cultural defense jurisprudence, this Essay should be regarded as a case study of a more endemic problem in legal scholarship. In tackling such an area, my goal is not to overthrow centuries of legal analysis, but rather to explore how we, as legal scholars, might use social science techniques to more systematically investigate, document, analyze, and predict the state of a particular comer of the legal universe.

The argument proceeds in two parts. Part II considers empirical approaches to the question raised by Lee: how might we ascertain the relationship between …

Integrating Contract Drafting Skills And Doctrine, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

In February 2006, I participated in the Symposium, Teaching Writing and Teaching Doctrine: A Symbiotic Relationship?, at Brooklyn Law School. I prepared some personal and unscientific observations about the challenges of concurrently teaching legal doctrine and contract drafting. Obviously, there is a rich literature on these topics that I did not try to address; instead, my goal was simply to acknowledge my first-hand experiences wrestling with these challenges and discuss some specific solutions I have tried. This brief Essay recaps my presentation.

Assessing The Ssrn-Based Law School Rankings, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One noteworthy feature of the SSRN-based rankings is the high correlation between them and other rankings. Black and Caron report correlation coefficients between their two Social Science Research Network (SSRN) school rankings (one based on downloads from SSRN and one based on the number of papers posted on SSRN) and six other published rankings. The correlations provide a useful and creative measure of consistency across studies. If ranking studies are highly correlated, then the least expensive and most efficient study to conduct can be used without incurring the expense and delay of the more labor-intensive ranking methods. SSRN has a …

Reflections On The Law Review Symposium On Women’S Rights And Pornography: Big Sister, Big Brother, And The Role Of Legal Scholarship In Affirming Human Rights, Nadine Strossen

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Jewish Law For The Law Librarian, David Hollander

Articles

Mr Hollander provides an introductory guide to the Jewish legal system with the intent of providing law librarians with the basic knowledge necessary to begin to help a patron conduct research in Jewish law.

Helping Students Develop A Humanistic Philosophy Of Lawyering, Beth Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the need to help students develop a cohesive philosophy of lawyering and suggests some ideas and methods to help introduce these concepts and concerns to students. Although this Article focuses primarily on aspects of the legal research and writing curriculum and pedagogy as well as professional development programs that can enhance the curriculum, the concepts are applicable and transferable to other subjects and courses. The purpose of this Article is to explore the issues raised by a conscious decision to help students consider and develop a beneficial philosophy of lawyering in areas including the development of legal …

The Two Hemispheres Of Legal Education And The Rise And Fall Of Local Law Schools, Randolph N. Jonakait

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

“Ain’T No Goin’ Back”: Teaching Mental Disability Law Courses Online, Michael L. Perlin

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Philosophy V. Rhetoric In Legal Education: Understanding The Schism Between Doctrinal And Legal Writing Faculty, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that although legal writing faculty know that what they teach is absolutely essential to their students' success, yet it continues to be grossly, even embarrassingly, undervalued in legal education. Doctrinal legal faculty perpetuate the view that legal education is a philosophical endeavor that focuses on the truth about the nature of law and, in the twenty-first century, on the law's ability to serve justice in a multicultural America. Because of their political power, however, doctrinal faculty are able to preserve the task of truth finding for themselves. Since the nature of truth is independent of its practical …