Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Open Legal Educational Materials: The Frequently Asked Questions, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

Faculty Scholarship

There has been considerable discussion in academic circles about the possibility of moving toward open educational materials—those which may be shared, copied and altered freely, without permission or fee. Legal education is particularly ripe for such a transition, as many of the source materials—including federal statutes and cases—are in the public domain. In this article, we discuss our experience producing an open casebook and statutory supplement on Intellectual Property Law, and answer many of the frequently asked questions about the project. Obviously, open coursebooks are less expensive and more convenient for students. But we found that they also offer pedagogical …

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing: Students, Scholars, And Sources In The Law Library, Jeanne Price

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Improving Legal Writing: A Life-Long Learning Process And Continuing Professional Challenge, Kathleen Elliott Vinson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

You've Got Rhythm: Curriculum Planning And Teaching Rhythm At Work In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fostering A Respect For Our Students, Our Specialty, And The Legal Profession: Introducing Ethics And Professionalism Into The Legal Writing Curriculum, Melissa H. Weresh

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pride And Prejudice: Lessons Legal Writers Can Learn From Literature, Michele G. Falkow

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

"I See And I Remember; I Do And Understand": Teaching Fundamental Structure In Legal Writing Through The Use Of Samples, Judith B. Tracy

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Students As (Re)Visionaries: Or, Revision, Revision, Revision, Susan M. Taylor

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Increased Importance Of Legal Writing In The Era Of “The Vanishing Trial”, Edward D. Re

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Helping International Students Avoid The Plagiarism Minefield: Suggestions From A Second Language Teacher And Writer, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this column for Perspectives: Teaching and Writing, Professor Diane B. Kraft provides suggestions to address the problem of plagiarism by international law students.

In The Mind's Eye: Visual Lessons For Law Students, Brian A. Glassman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article shows how to use works of art to demonstrate essential components of effective legal writing. Part I discusses the learning theory under pinning the use of visual lessons. Part II describes the lessons themselves. Part III explains the benefits--both direct and indirect--that result from using visual lessons to teach law and summarizes student responses to the use of these lessons in first-year legal writing. The conclusion suggests ways in which this technique might be extended and adapted to teach not only legal writing but also other law school courses.

Book Review: “The Good Lawyer: Seeking Quality In The Practice Of Law”, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

In their first collaboration, The Happy Lawyer, the writing team of Nancy Levit and Doug Linder tackled a crucially important subject: how to have a happy life in the law. As part of that project, they interviewed more than two hundred lawyers about what makes them happy in their jobs. Levit and Linder noticed that happy lawyers nearly always talked about doing good work. Curious about the connection, the authors turned to recent research in neuroscience and learned, not to their surprise, that a key to a happy life is, indeed, the sense of doing good work. It is …

Alan Watson's Controversial Contribution To Legal Scholarship, Gary Francione

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Stop Me If You’Ve Heard This Before: Transitions In Teaching Legal Research, Patricia Morgan

UF Law Faculty Publications

Law schools are being called upon to produce more “practice ready” graduates. To that end, the University of Florida added a librarian-taught first-year Legal Research course to its curriculum. As a result of the course addition, there was an impact on the existing Advanced Legal Research (ALR) course. For the first time, the ALR students had already received legal research instruction. This required adjustments in this higher level course.

Technology And Client Communications: Preparing Law Students And New Lawyers To Make Choices That Comply With The Ethical Duties Of Confidentiality, Competence, And Communication, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

That the use of technology has radically changed the legal profession is beyond dispute. Through technology, lawyers can now represent clients in faraway states and countries, and they can represent even local clients through a “virtual law office.” Gone are the times in which the lawyer’s choices for communicating with clients primarily involve preparing formal business letters to convey advice, holding in-person client meetings in the office, or conducting telephone calls with clients on landlines from the confines of the lawyer’s office. Not only do lawyers have choices about how to communicate with their clients, but they also frequently choose …

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Lee Keene

Mercer Law Review

While the practice of law is often equated with writing, many law courses involve little or no writing during the semester, and often only require writing in student assessment. While accredited law schools are required to offer both first-year legal writing instruction and a rigorous writing experience during the second or third year,2 few law schools infuse legal writing throughout a student's three years of law school matriculation. While significant attention is given to the breadth of law taught in law school, more attention must be given to the depth of this knowledge and the application of this knowledge to …

A Bibliography Of University Of Nebraska College Of Law Faculty Scholarship 1892–2013, Marcia L. Dority Baker, Stefanie S. Pearlman

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

This bibliography attempts to include all faculty members at the College of Law beginning in 1892 through the faculty members of the 2012–2013 academic year. We included publications from tenure-track law, law library, and law clinical faculty members and visiting faculty members who were at the College of Law for three or more years. Although we did not include the scholarship of faculty members who visited for less than three years or adjunct faculty, we did include a list of those faculty members for historical purposes. We used the Official Bulletin of Nebraska Law and the Nebraska Law Review to …

Vol. 46, No. 02 (January 27, 2014)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Vol. 46, No. 01 (January 20, 2014)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Report Of The Aals Committee On Libraries And Technology, Subcommittee On Law Library Reporting Structures, Aals Committee On Libraries And Technology, Subcommittee On Law Library Reporting Structures, Anne Klinefelter, Kay L. Andrus, Joanne A. Epps, Frank Liu, Susan Nevelow-Mart, Spencer Simons

Faculty Publications

The reporting structure for academic law libraries is a topic of renewed debate. Tradition and accreditation standards for law schools have supported law school oversight of law libraries to ensure that library services would focus on the goals of the law school. Because legal research has been considered a bedrock component of legal education and legal practice, law libraries have long been closely aligned with law schools. However, new information technologies, increased pressures for efficiencies, growing interest in interdisciplinary work, and growing interdisciplinary demand for lawyer librarian expertise in information law have inspired questions about potential advantages of strengthening the …

When The Aba Comes Calling, Let’S Speak The Same Language Of Assessment, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

There has been much discussion recently in legal education circles about the need for improvements in assessment. Recently, the American Bar Association has responded by adding an assessment requirement to the accreditation standards, making the subject even more urgent. Because most of us in the legal academy are new to the language and methods of assessment, there have been misunderstandings. And further, because there are different levels of assessment and each level usually has different goals, sometimes the discussion can become confused. It is imperative that we understand the different levels and goals of assessment projects, so we may communicate …

Lights! Camera! Law School?: Using Video Interviews To Enhance First Semester Writing Assignments, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Meeting The Challenges Of Instructing International Law Graduate Students In Legal Research, Nina E. Scholtz, Femi Cadmus

Cornell Law Librarians' Publications

Teaching international LL.M. students legal research offers its own peculiar challenges. The brevity of the LL.M. program and the limited time available for thoroughly introducing basic research concepts have made it particularly difficult, but the innovative and creative methods of instruction highlighted in this article have provided good solutions.

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Lee Keene

Faculty Scholarship

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students’ and new attorneys’ knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close …

Erasing Boundaries: Inter-School Collaboration And Its Pedagogical Opportunities, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On Legal Scholarship, Danielle K. Citron, Robin West

Shorter Faculty Works

Academic critics contend that legal scholarship is overly argumentative or too “normative,” simply stating what the law should be, as well as what the law is. It isn’t about pure scholarship’s pursuit of knowledge within the discipline of a recognized academic field. Critics from the bar and the judiciary proffer the opposite complaint: legal scholarship is too academic and not professional enough, enamored with fads, unmoored from any discipline and of little use to the practicing lawyer or sitting judge. Law schools’ legions of cost-conscious critics complain that paying high salaries to professors with low course loads drives up tuitions. …

The Dominance Of Teams In The Production Of Legal Knowledge, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

While collaboration is familiar to some legal researchers, the field, for the most part, does not seem to implicate the large-scale complexity and cost that has become associated with big science. These logistical differences, combined with a very strong cultural preference in legal academic circles for solitary work, could potentially keep team research from dominating the production of legal knowledge to the same extent that it has come to dominate the production of knowledge in other areas. On the other hand, the dominance of team research outputs and a shift towards team research has been observed in social sciences and …

Crowdsourced Coursebooks, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai

Faculty Articles

Given increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. Working with a technology startup, we are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The …

Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring The Influence Of Legal Research Medium, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession is presently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment. Attorneys now locate and access legal authorities primarily through electronic means. Although this shift to an electronic research medium radically changes how attorneys discover and encounter law, little empirical work investigates impacts from the shift to an electronic medium.

This Article presents the results of one of the most robust empirical studies conducted to date comparing research processes using print and electronic sources. While the study presented in this Article was modest in scope, the extent and type of the differences that it reveals are notable. Some of the observed …

On The Receiving End Of Influence: Helping Craft The Scholarship Of My Students And How Their Work Influences Me, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

My essay is divided into two parts. In part one I share about the struggle I had to endure to even allow myself the opportunity to be influenced by my students. Institutional struggles and professorial expectations as to how the academy should operate were hurdles I had to clear. Also, I had personal hurdles of making the commitment that I did for over five years. In part two, I primarily focus on some of my law students’ scholarship over the past five years and reflect on the life changing influence they have had on me. Their work and dedication have …