Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Haydn Doren's Defense In The Court Of The Jarl Of Whiterun, Balgruuf The Greater, Ryan W. Selfridge

Student Publications

This paper is a look at an American Mock Trial Association scenario placed in the world of Skyrim. The piece applies legal concepts regarding forming narratives in the courtroom, something that is absolutely necessary to a jury trial. The unique scenario the trial was held in facilitated the explanation of the rules of evidence in the footnotes, and illustrates how the evidence was admitted to the court.

From Disability To Usability In Online Instruction, Susan David Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article is a primer on the work needed to ensure accessibility in online instruction. It discusses different disabilities, reviews relevant laws and standards, and explores the relationship between accessibility and the principles of universal design. The article introduces a number of best practices for creating accessibility in online instruction.

Researching Environmental Justice: A Conversation, Virginia C. Thomas, William W. Lefevre

Library Scholarly Publications

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” The concerns that arise in this complex environmental context extend beyond the scope of traditional legal research resources to include historical, social, scientific, and governmental documents that reside in unique archival collections.

Through the conversation that follows, senior archivist William LeFevre of the Walter P. Reuther Library shares his experience and insights on how archival resources can provide essential support …

Beyond The E-Reader: Alternative Uses For The Ipad In Libraries, Rachel Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Explores how libraries use iPads to improve productivity and maximize staff time. Includes recommendations for using iPads as web development, video conferencing, mobile service point, online polling and self-checkout tools, as well as suggestions for specific productivity apps,

Digital Commons And Ssrn: Turning Perceived Conflict Into Real Synergy, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

Presentations

Covers the history of SSRN and the development of institutional repositories, how to positively address faculty concerns about losing SSRN download statistics, statistical analysis of downloads on each platform and research behavior, and an overview of the strengths and advantages of each platform.

When You Need To Know, These Are The Places To Go: Investigative Research On The Web, Suzanne R. Graham

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

Provides an overview of the kind of publicly-available information on the Web. Includes tips for how to find vital data about a person (birth and death dates and contact information), about investment and salary, and about prior interactions with court system.

Slides: Best Management Practices For Oil And Gas Development And Comparative Water Quality Database Of Regulations Relating To Shale Oil And Gas, Matt Samelson, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment. Intermountain Oil And Gas Bmp Project

Fracking, Water Quality and Public Health: Examining Current Laws and Regulations (March 20)

Presenter: Matt Samelson, J.D., Attorney, Consultant for Intermountain Oil and Gas Best Management Practices (BMP) Project, Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment, University of Colorado Law School

34 slides

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 …

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.

Public Access To Primary Legal Information In China: Challenges And Opportunities, Xiaomeng Zhang

Law Librarian Scholarship

Despite a lack of a national legislation that mandates open government information in the People's Republic of China, each major government branch has taken proactive efforts to make primary legal information issued within their power available to the public. A close examination of Chinese official legal information portals on the national level reveal issues such as a lack of uniformity and a lack of access to authenticated primary legal information. This article proposes a solution that would not only offer more consistent guidelines for the government but would empower the public to assert their right to primary legal information more …

Hawking Hyphens In Compound Modifiers, Joan Ames Magat

Faculty Scholarship

The first principle of legal writing is surely its clarity — visible actors (unless the action matters more), uncluttered syntax, and, of course, logical structure. But the little things can matter to clarity, too — such as deliberate punctuation that signifies. In the language of law, in which compound nouns are rife, the reader can feel adrift as to where modifiers end and the noun begins. (Consider government-subsidized health flexible-spending arrangement without those hyphens.) Hyphens help. Whether an author cares to hyphenate the noun is his call; but hyphenating compound modifiers (also called phrasal adjectives, though they may include adverbs …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

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

Faculty Scholarship

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.

The Changing Discourse Of The Supreme Court, Stephen M. Johnson

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “Academics, judges, and other commentators complain that, for the past few decades, the Justices on the Supreme Court have been increasingly writing opinions that are unreadable for most American citizens. Those critics complain that the opinions are too long and too complex, riddled with incomprehensible multi-part tests. They also attack the style of the opinions and assert that recent opinions are more likely to be written in a technocratic, rather than persuasive, style.

There seems to be little consensus among the critics regarding why the Justices are writing opinions that are increasingly unreadable. Some attribute it to the increasing …

Research And The Professional : Navigating A Spectrum Of Legal Resources., Erin K Gow

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Legal research is complicated by the growing amount of information available, and there is evidence that legal practitioners require additional training in order to enhance their information literacy and legal research skills. Librarians have a key role to play in developing legal research training, and examples taken from Middle Temple's library are used to illustrate ways in which librarians can offer beneficial training to their library users. This involves assessing the skills, motivation, and needs of the average library user in order to design legal research training that is educationally sound and appealing to the target audience.

Bridging The Justice Gap: Exploring Approaches For Improving Indigent Access To Civil Counsel, Kelsey Atkinson

Pomona Senior Theses

The United States is among one of the only democratic industrialized nations in the world that does not provide guaranteed access to civil representation in cases involving basic human need. This leaves indigent litigants who are at risk of losing their homes or their children left to seek counsel through insufficient pro-bono programs or limited scope legal self-help centers. This thesis provides a history of the struggle for the right to civil counsel, known as Civil Gideon, and explores a variety of proposed solutions to bridge the justice gap for indigent litigants. Despite considerable support for Civil Gideon among scholars …

Creating And Teaching A Specialized Legal Research Course: The Benefits And Considerations, Erika Cohn

All Faculty Scholarship

This article outlines the author's experience creating and teaching a specialized legal research course. It includes the reasons for offering such a course, tips for selecting a topic and developing a syllabus, getting the course approved, creating student interest, developing a teaching plan, and evaluating the course.

Not Just For Scouting Anymore: Digital Badges For Legal Research Skills, Alcasid Hannah, Susan David Demaine, Catherine A. Lemmer, Benjamin J. Keele

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

W&L Law Fall Scholarship Celebration 2013, Nora V. Demleitner

Library Events

On November 14, 2013, the Washington and Lee Law Library hosted a first-of-its-kind Fall Scholarship Celebration. The event took place in the Law Library's main reading room from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

On display were dozens of scholarly articles, books, chapters, and amicus briefs authored by the W&L Law faculty and student body during 2012 and 2013, with hundreds of additional works accessible online through the Scholarly Commons institutional repository.

Faculty, librarians, staff, and administrators mingled with law students over hors d'oeuvres and wine to peruse the formidable scholarly output of the W&L Law community. Spouses, alumni, faculty from …

Clark Memorandum: Fall 2013, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Byu Law School Alumni Association, J. Reuben Clark Law Society

The Clark Memorandum

• Looking Beyond the Stacks (David L. Armond and Shawn G. Nevers)
• A Lesson in Flying (RonNell Anderson Jones)
• Faith, Family, and Religious Freedom (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland)
• Instruments in His Hand (Elder Larry Echo Hawk)

What Users Want: A Contextual Overview Of Open Access Legal Resources In The United States, Brian T. Detweiler

Law Librarian Other Scholarship

Paper presented at the Law via the Internet Conference, Jersey, Channel Islands, September 26-27, 2013.

An Examination Of Cities' Resilence To Violent Crime: A Contextual Analysis Of Victim-Offender Convergence, Vanessa Hatch Woodward

Dissertations

In his 2012 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, Robert Sampson purported that causality can only be reached when social science researchers accept that individual actions are dependent on social context. He referred to this as contextual causality and argued that future research needed to focus on how to measure and/or reoperationalize community measures of crime.

There were three primary goals of this study. First was to provide a better understanding of victim-offender convergence in time and space (Cohen & Felson, 1979) within incidents of violent crime. In order to meet this goal, 90 city agencies’ incident and …

Case Law Research Using Westlaw Campus, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Presentation by Robert Berry on the basics of Case law research.

University Of New Hampshire School Of Law Library, Susan Drisko Zago

Law Faculty Scholarship

Review of The University of New Hampshire School of Law Library, Concord, NH.

Elm In The Courtroom: Application To Trial Juries, Natalie Claire Hopkins

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …

A Pilot Using Overdrive: E-Lending In Academic Law Libraries, Nina E. Scholtz

Cornell Law Librarians' Publications

E-books are not just for popular reading; legal publishers are entering the e-book market as well. Major publishers are launching e-book platforms and offering law libraries the opportunity to purchase both individual titles and collections of electronic books that they also offer in print. With increasing signs of a strong future for e-books, and possibly for e-lending as well, in spring 2012 Cornell Law Library decided to pilot OverDrive for the Cornell Law School community. By embarking on a pilot of the OverDrive service, we could test the waters of e-lending in a cost-efficient way that would not be prohibitive …

A Brief Guide To Finding International Treaties, Jennifer Sekula

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Seen It All, Heard It All, Done It All. Is It All Worth It?, Julie Lim

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Time Of Day On Reference Interactions In Academic Law Libraries, Seth Quidachay-Swan

Law Librarian Scholarship

Libraries and librarians generally aspire to provide the best services they can to their user communities. But what does that mean? Assumptions about what is needed may not necessarily align with the actual preferences of a given user group. In this column, Seth Quidachay-Swan presents a case study that explores the interaction between time of day and medium of information delivery. Examining data gathered in a law library environment, the author concludes that modern presumptions about the diminishing need for traditional information services may not allow for effectively managing user expectations.