Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Teamwork Builds A Modern Traditional Library, Mitchell Counts, Robert Linz

Publications

No abstract provided.

Building A Tower Of Babel Or Building A Discipline? Talking About Legal Writing, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

High-quality writing is one of the crafts most necessary to a successful career in law. Mature legal professionals, lawyers, judges, and law professors write every day. Often, they write cooperatively--editing and redrafting a shared document. Nevertheless, those trained in the law may lack a common language that enables them to talk with each other about writing. Like the workers building the tower in the biblical story of Babel, legal professionals sometimes find themselves unable to communicate about their work.

Unlike most subjects in the legal academy, legal writing has emerged as an area of serious study in law schools only …

Do Best Practices In Legal Education Include Emphasis On Compositional Modes Of Studying Law As A Liberal Art?, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Reporter's Notes on "A Liberal Education in Law: Engaging the Legal Imagination through Research and Writing Beyond the Curriculum."

The Rhetorics Of Legal Authority Constructing Authoritativeness, The “Ellen Effect,” And The Example Of Sodomy Law., Kris Franklin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

The University Of St. Thomas Law Library: A New Library For A New Era In Legal Education, Edmund P. Edmonds

Journal Articles

In spring 2000, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul/Minneapolis, Minnesota, offered me an intriguing challenge: Would I be willing to help create a brand new law library at St. Thomas' new School of Law? That opportunity was, in many ways, the ultimate chance to reconsider the fundamental underlying premises that form one's basic vision of a law library. One's understanding and thinking about these basic ideas forms the foundation on which one makes critical decisions about the law library every working day. What would it be like to have no past history to either inform or encumber those …

Availability Of Works Cited In Recent Law Review Articles On Lexis, Westlaw, The Internet, And Other Databases, Simon Canick

Faculty Scholarship

In this study, a group of recent law articles was examined to determine the proportion of cited resources that are easily findeable online. Searches were conducted in databases such as LEXIS and Westlaw, and on the Internet, for full-text versions of every source cited in seven articles. The results have been broken down into 13 categories, including: federal cases, books, foreign law, and legal periodicals pre-1990. Not surprisingly coverage differs widely between the categories. Overall the study found that 77% of the 1,984 citations in the articles reviewed are available online. This article concludes with a general discussion of why …

The Inside Scoop: What Federal Judges Really Think About The Way Lawyers Write, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A recent survey indicates that what troubles federal judges most is not what lawyers say but what they fail to say when writing briefs. Although lawyers do a good job articulating legal issues and citing controlling, relevant legal authority, they are not doing enough with the law itself. Only fifty-six percent of the judges surveyed said that lawyers “always” or “usually” make their client’s best arguments. Fifty-eight percent of the judges rated the quality of the legal analysis as just “good,” as opposed to “excellent” or “very good.” The problem seems to be that briefs lack rigorous analysis, and the …

Improving Legal Writing Courses: Perspectives From The Bar And Bench, Constance Krontz, Susan Mcclellan

Faculty Articles

To fine-tune legal writing courses to better prepare law students to enter legal practice, Professors Constance Krontz and Susan McClellan surveyed judges and practicing attorneys who supervise the work of first-year associates or judicial law clerks. They selected attorneys from a variety of practices in Washington State, including offices of public defenders and state prosecutors, the Attorney General's office, and private firms of various sizes. They sought information about the performance of all first-year clerks and associates, without reference to where they obtained their law degrees. Knowledge of the bench and bar's perception of the oral and written performance of …

The Way We Were And What We “B”, Kelly Kunsch

Faculty Articles

This article describes the changes over the past 20 years in the job of reference librarian. Using typical reference questions and quotes from leading law librarians in the early '80s, the author compares current practice and explains the differences in the time, place, and manner of legal reference. Although answering questions may be done today more quickly and efficiently than 20 years ago, the increase in demand and expectations make the job more challenging than ever.

Using A Civil Procedure Exam Question To Teach Persuasion, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Studies show that learners master new material more effectively when it builds upon what they already know. By revisiting assignments from a previous semester, students can focus their efforts on persuading, rather than learning new doctrine or facts. Turning a predictive discussion into a persuasive argument demonstrates that making an argument requires the same rigorous thinking as predicting a result. One way to do this is to assign students to write an argument based on their fall Civil Procedure exam.

Introduction To "Books", Margaret A. Leary

Articles

It's well known that graduate William B. Cook's generosity provided the Law School with its trademark Gothic Law Quadrangle. It is less universally known that Cook endowed the Law School with a trust to support faculty research, and had a strong interest in the nature of that research. He chose to call the library building "Legal Research" and to inscribe above the main entrance "Learned and cultured lawyers are safeguards of the republic." Cook often said that the lack of "intellectual leadership 1s the greatest problem which faces America," and he wanted this Law School to provide that missing leadership. …

Business Lawyer, Woman Warrior: An Allegory Of Feminine And Masculine Theories, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

The first part of this essay is a discourse on how two of the last half century’s most influential contributions to legal thinking: Law and Economics Jurisprudence and Feminist Legal Theory, whose adherents are normally adversaries, can function synergistically to create a greater analytic power. Using business law issues as an example - historically law and economics’ terrain but recently explored by feminism - I comment on how each can unravel different knots but each standing alone leave other conundrums unresolved.

Expanding on the feminist concept of “masculine thinking,” I discuss how, just as law and economics’ analytic style (i.e., …

Escape To Alcatraz: What Self-Guided Museum Tours Can Show Us About Teaching Legal Research, James B. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Credit Cards In The United States And Japan, Ronald J. Mann

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is excerpted from a paper prepared during fall 2000 during the author's stay in Tokyo as a visiting scholar at the Institutefor Monetary and Economic Studies at the Bank of Japan.

One of the most important aspects of consumer payment systems in the United States is the widespread use of credit cards. American consumers use credit cards to pay for about one-fifth of their purchases each year. That pattern of use is not universal.

A Suggestion On Suggestion, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is adapted from "The Suggestibility of Children: Scientific Research and Legal Implication" (86.1 Cornell Law Review 33-108 [November 2000]) and appears here with permission of the publisher.

The vulnerabilities of young children have far-reaching implications for the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Arguably, these vulnerabilities may affect how an investigator should interview the child; whether her hearsay statements should be admitted; whether expert evidence concerning her vulnerability should be admitted; and whether a criminal conviction based principally on her testimony should be allowed.

Secondary Legal Sources: A Selected Subject Bibliography Of Treatises, Looseleaf Services And Form Books Seventh Edition, Thomas G. Oatmen

Law Library Publications

This bibliography, now in its seventh edition, is a subject arrangement of selected English language treatises, looseleaf services and form books in the University of Michigan Law Library, current through 2001.

The goal of the bibliography is to list books that provide a starting point for legal research in major areas of American law. It includes only works published since 1990 or those kept current via looseleaf or other supplementation. Books that are kept up-to-date by some sort of supplementation are indicated by a hyphen following the publication date, e.g., "1949-". The bibliography excludes casebooks, journals, popular works and encyclopedias. …

The Lawyering Process Program: Building Competence And Confidence, Terrill Pollman, Jennifer B. Anderson

Scholarly Works

In this article, the authors describe the Lawyering Process Program at the William S. Boyd School of Law. Like their colleagues at law schools across the country, students at the Boyd School of Law spend the early part of their law school careers learning the basics of legal research and writing. Unlike many of their fellow IL's, however, Boyd students also learn other important concepts and skills. The Lawyering Process Program at Boyd is a unique, three-semester class that includes significant instruction and experience in four areas: (1) legal writing and analysis; (2) legal research; (3) lawyering skills; and (4) …

I Know That I Taught Them How To Do That, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

Teachers have complained for years that students could not transfer their skills from one class to another, and employers have complained that the students could not apply the skills they learned in class to real world tasks. This article delves into the issues involved in students acquiring skills and the ability to transfer those to skills to similar tasks. The article describes the four steps involved in transfer identified by researchers: problem representation, search and retrieval, mapping, and application.

Legal Scholarship As A Vocation, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law professors occupy a twin role as scholars and (most of them, at any rate) as lawyers. Deborah Rhode has pointed out, in her contribution to this symposium, that the lawyer role of the professor carries with it some frequently overlooked obligations, specifically the obligation to perform pro bono service. I agree with her, and have ventured similar arguments myself. Here I will address the more purely theoretical side of the legal scholar's vocation. The text I will take for my sermon is the famous speech on the scholar's role that Max Weber delivered to a student audience eighty years …

Twenty-Five Years Through The Virginia Law Review (With Gun And Camera), Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

It is a great honor to be asked to offer a few remarks to such an august gathering. But I must confess to having had a certain puzzlement when the invitation to speak to the Law Review banquet first came. I asked one of my colleagues, "Why would they have asked me?" "It's obvious," he replied. "Their first three choices turned them down."

With that in mind, I asked my secretary, "What do they want me to talk about?" "The Future of Legal Education," she replied (somewhat portentously). This suggestion didn't ring quite true to me. I have been to …

Incorporating Bar Pass Strategies Into Routine Teaching Practices, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Second-Class Citizens In The Pink Ghetto: Gender Bias In Legal Writing, Jo Anne Durako

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching First-Year Civil Procedure And Other Introductory Courses By The Problem Method, Stephen J. Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

I have been teaching the first-year course in Civil Procedure for twenty years, first for five years at Ohio Northern University, and for the last fifteen years at the University of Baltimore, where I also teach a required second-year course in Evidence. When I first started teaching Civil Procedure, I used a fairly typical case method. I was never very happy with this approach for teaching a course in which one of my major goals was getting the students to learn to read, interpret and apply the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (“Federal Rules”). Gradually, I began to develop sets …

The Citing Of Law Reviews By The Supreme Court:1971-1999, Louis J. Sirico Jr.

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Postmodern Infiltration Of Legal Scholarship, Arthur Austin

Michigan Law Review

For legal scholars it is the best of times. We are inundated by an eclectic range of writing that pushes the envelope from analysis and synthesis to the upper reaches of theory. Mainstream topics face fierce competition from fresh ideological visions, a variety of genres, and spirited criticism of the status quo. Young professors have access to a burgeoning variety of journals to circulate their ideas and advice while the mass media covets them as public intellectuals. There is a less sanguine mood; an increasingly vocal group of scholars complain that it is the worst of times and refer to …

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: A Vision For The Future, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Languages Of A Divided Kingdom: Logic And Literacy In The Writing Curriculum, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 49 (2000), Joel R. Cornwell

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Barbara, Celarent, Darii, And Ferio Flunk Out Of Law School: Comment On Scott Brewer, On The Possibility Of Necessity In Legal Argument, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 77 (2000), Linda Ross Meyer

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Teaching Lawyers The Language Of Law: Legal And Anthropological Translations, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 91 (2000), Elizabeth Mertz

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Language Acculturation Processes And Resistance To In"Doctrine"Ation In The Legal Skills Curriculum And Beyond: A Commentary On Mertz's Critical Anthropology Of The Socratic, Doctrinal Classroom, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 131 (2000), Brook K. Baker

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.