Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Fuller And Language, Joseph Vining

Book Chapters

His style made him distinctive. His substance made him distinctive. The two crossed, were genetically related as we now say. Style and substance each drew on and was implied by the other. One point of their crossing was his sense of the nature of human language; what language was and could be, what it was not and could never be. In 1930, early in his work, Fuller took up the problem of language in a series of articles. Toward the end of his time he republished this initial ground-establishing effort as the little book we now have, Legal Fictions, …

Introduction: Critical Race Praxis And Legal Scholarship, Keith Aoki, Margaret Chon

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The publication of this symposium issue is an occasion for three distinct and yet related celebrations. First, we honor the Western Law Teachers of Color, whose sixth annual meeting on the sublime Oregon Coast in 1998 provided the occasion for organizing the papers published here. Dean Strickland's preface, as well as Professors Linda Greene's and Jim Jones's essays examine the historical significance of this occasion in greater detail. Second, we engage in a festschrift of a particular member of this group-Professor Eric K. Yamamoto -whose publication of a book this year is a significant capstone to fifteen years of scholarship …

From Tokenism To Emancipatory Politics: The Conferences And Meetings Of Law Professors Of Color, Linda S. Greene

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In this paper, the author traces the history of the First National Meetings and conferences since 1969. In Part II, this paper explores the range of meetings and conferences which outlined the development of a proactive agenda for minority student and faculty inclusion within mainstream historically White legal institutions and the evolution of this agenda from one of access to an agenda of security, retention, and the advancement of legal theory and scholarship within and without the established academy. Part III chronicles the maturation of this tradition of independent meetings and conferences of professors of color into a network of …

Writing And Reading In Philosophy, Law, And Poetry, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

In this paper I will treat a very general question, the nature of writing and what can be achieved by it, pursuing it in the three distinct contexts provided by philosophy, law, and poetry.

My starting-point will be Plato's Phaedrus, where, in a wellknown passage, Socrates attacks writing itself: he says that true philosophy requires the living engagement of mind with mind of a kind that writing cannot attain. Yet this is obviously a paradox, for Socrates' position is articulated and recorded by Plato in writing. How then can we make sense of what Plato is saying and doing? What …

Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics, by William H. Simon, is one of the most thoughtful and important books in legal theory - not just legal ethics - published in the past ten years. Like David Luban's seminal contribution to legal ethics, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, published a decade ago, Simon's book is a deliberate rival to accounts of lawyers' professional responsibility that begin with a command to zealous advocacy, end with a prohibition on outright illegal conduct, and offer nothing in between. Authors and commentators have grown increasingly dissatisfied with this as the basic …

Direct Democracy In America, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

The phrase "laboratories of democracy," as applied to the states, seems most often to mean something more like "democratic laboratories" - democratic testing grounds for various approaches to social problems. What sort of welfare reform will be most effective? Let Wisconsin try out Plan A, while Michigan experiments with Plan B. What combination of tort liability rules will achieve desired levels of compensation and deterrence? Let the states experiment with strict liability, comparative negligence, or various nofault schemes. It is also true, however, that the states are literally laboratories of democracy - arenas in which democratic institutions are themselves experimented …

Legal Writing Scholarship: Point/Counterpoint, Jan M. Levine, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

Perhaps because the field of legal writing has now matured enough so that we professors constitute a critical mass of experienced teachers and scholars, we find ourselves frequently embroiled in debates about legal writing scholarship. What is it? Can we do it? Should we do it? Should it be considered part and parcel of our responsibilities as members of the law school world? To help us better present our shared view that legal writing professors not only can but should produce scholarship, we sought first to take on the role of devil’s advocate, presenting all the rationales we have heard …

The Richness Of Contract Theory, Randy E. Barnett

Michigan Law Review

When I teach the doctrine of good faith performance, I assign an exchange between two distinguished contracts scholars, Robert Summers and Steven Burton, that has come to be known as the "Summers-Burton" debate. This debate is interesting not only for the contrasting views of its protagonists concerning the doctrine of good faith, but also because of the generational shift in modes of scholarship it represents. In the 1950s and 1960s, contracts scholars, like so many others, rejected so-called "conceptualist" or "formalist" approaches that attempted to dictate the outcome of cases with general concepts and rules. Contracts scholarship was dominated by …

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

The Book Review Issue: An Owner's Guide, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

Law reviews have short memories. Other institutions count on long-term managers and well-kept files to preserve the experience of the past. But there is no remembrance of things past in an institution whose officers serve - fileless and frantic - for a single year. I want to use the opportunity this volume's editors have kindly given me to contribute to the Michigan Law Review's institutional memory. Editors past, present, and future may be curious about when and why the book review issue was conceived and born. I will briefly tell that story. More significantly, however, I want to relate the …

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Damaška: Evidence Law Adrift. A Book Review, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

Let me state my biases at the start. I am a great fan of Professor Damaska and have been ever since I read his first book, The Faces of Justice and State Authority. Professor Damaska's most recent book, Evidence Law Adrift, adds to my admiration. In Evidence Law Adrift Professor Dama~ka examines Continental and Anglo-American trial procedures and argues that changes in the way Anglo-American courts resolve cases, especially the marginalization of the jury trial, strip common law evidence doctrine of its theoretical base and place it in danger of becoming an intellectual curiosity confined, in Professor Damaska's words, "to …

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 …

Breaking Into The Academy: The 1998-2000 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

I was not very far into my law school experience when I realized that my professors had the best job in town-it took me quite a bit longer to discover that I, too, could get in on the deal. Do not misunderstand me-being a law professor is not easy. In fact, when done correctly, the job requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, emotional commitment, long hours, and hard work. However, if you enjoy writing, research, public speaking, and developing mentoring relationships, being a law professor could be the career for you. This Article, and the listings of helpful organizations …

Some Examples Of Using Legal Relations Language In The Legal Domain: Applied Deontic Logic, Layman E. Allen

Articles

The fundamental concept of the LEGAL RELATIONS Language (LRL) is the recursively-defined notion of LEGAL RELATION (LR). As LR is defined here, there is an infinite number of different LEGAL RELATIONS, and LRL is a language for precisely and completely describing each of those infinite number of dfferent LEGAL RELATIONS. With its robust collection of dfferent names, one for each of the different LEGAL RELATIONS, LRL provides adequate vocabulary for (1) describing every possible legal state of affairs, (2) accounting for every possible change from one legal state of affairs to another, (3) representing every possible legal rule, and (4) …

Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak And Constitutional "Meaning" For The Uninitiated, Dennis W. Arrow

Michigan Law Review

A parody of postmodern writing.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Vampires Anonymous And Critical Race Practice, Robert A. Williams Jr.

Michigan Law Review

I can only explain what Vampires Anonymous has done for me by telling my story. I know, stories, particularly autobiographical stories, are currently being dissed by some law professors. Raised in an overly obsessive, objectively neutralized cultural style, they are plain and simple Storyhaters. Their middle to upper class parents had money, a home in the burbs, and nice kids who were going to go on from their fancy grade schools and college preparatory gigs to Harvard/Stanford/Yale - all those types of pricey places where law professors usually come from. These kids were raised to be objective, neutral, neutered, fair, …

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

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. …