Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Editing, Vehicles In The Park, And The Virtue Of Clarity, Patrick Barry

Articles

What is the optimal amount of advocacy?

My law students and I face that question all the time. We face it when we’re drafting motions. We face it when we’re proposing changes to contracts. We even face it when putting together key emails, text messages, and social-media posts.

In all these situations and many more, we don’t want to oversell our arguments and ideas — but we don’t want to undersell them either. Instead, we hope to hit that perfect sweet spot known as “persuasion.”

We don’t always succeed, but one thing that has significantly increased our effectiveness is the …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Nicholson W. Price, Keerthana Nunna, Jonathan Tietz

Articles

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgments paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those factors. The landscape …

An Appeal To Books, Amir H. Ali

Michigan Law Review

This feels a fit, even urgent, moment to celebrate our books and the role they play vis-à-vis the law, the courts, and the truth.

As this issue goes to print, our nation’s highest court faces forceful criticism that some of its most significant decisions have been detached from objective fact. In recent Terms, the Supreme Court’s majority has doubled down on deciding major constitutional questions based on “history and tradition”—that is, the majority’s understanding of what the nation was like centuries ago. Just as quickly as these justices praised the objectivity of their fealty to history, they met widespread rebuke …

Allow Me To Transform: A Black Guy’S Guide To A New Constitution, Brandon Hasbrouck

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. By Elie Mystal.

Mothers In Law, Melissa Murray

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. By Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

Heeding The Voices Of Migrant Youth: The Need For Action, Randi Mandelbaum

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Unaccompanied: The Plight of Immigrant Youth at the Border. By Emily Ruehs-Navarro.

An Order, Most Fixed, Alexandra D. Lahav

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. By Lorraine Daston.

Sisters Gonna Work It Out: Black Women As Reformers And Radicals In The Criminal Legal System, Paul Butler

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. By Derecka Purnell and a review of Progressive Prosecution: Race and Reform in Criminal Justice. Edited by Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony C. Thompson.

Beyond More Accurate Algorithms: Takeaways From Mccleskey Revisited, Ngozi Okidegbe

Michigan Law Review

A Review of McCleskey v. Kemp. By Mario Barnes, in Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law 557, 581. Edited by Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R.A. Lenhardt and Angela Onwuachi-Willig.

Akhil Amar’S Unusable Past, Gregory Ablavsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. By Akhil Reed Amar.

Nepantla/Coatlicue/Conocimiento, Gerald Torres

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. By Gloria Anzaldúa.

Résumé Review: Breadth And Depth, Patrick Barry

Articles

Nobody is born knowing how to craft an effective résumé. But because the document can play a major role in a young lawyer’s career, I often talk with law students and new attorneys about how they might revise the versions they send out to potential employers. I usually frame my advice by telling them about a concept that can give their resumes a helpful organizing structure: being “T-shaped.”

Preface To Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: Jalwd, Margaret C. Hannon, Jessica Wherry

Other Publications

We celebrate the Twentieth Volume of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD! This volume reveals and discusses opportunities for growth and new frontiers in the field of legal communication. ChatGPT makes its first impact on the journal with former Editor-in-Chief Ian Gallacher's essay, and we invited ChatGPT to help with the preface. ChatGPT's response to "write a preface for a journal volume with a theme of opportunities for growth and new frontiers in the field of legal communication" was a bit over the top (which could have been tempered with a revised prompt).

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry

Articles

In the "Feedback Loops" column back in March, we introduced the "E-D-I-T" framework:

• Find something to Eliminate
• Find something to Decrease
• Find something to Increase
• Find something to Try

This new column will discuss each category more in depth.

Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

Secondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.

Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of …

Non-Lawyer Judges In Devalued Courts, Maureen Carroll

Reviews

Recent legal scholarship has shed needed light on the vast universe of litigation that occurs without lawyers. Large majorities of civil litigants lack representation, even in weighty matters such as eviction and termination of parental rights, raising a host of issues worthy of scholarly attention. For example, one recent article has examined racial and gendered effects of the lack of constitutionally guaranteed counsel in civil matters, and another has shown that judges tend not to reduce the complexity of the proceedings for the benefit of unrepresented parties. In Judging Without a J.D., Sara Greene and Kristen Renberg add an important …

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz

Law & Economics Working Papers

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgements paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Great legal writing is about more than mechanics. But careful attention to legal writing mechanics is nevertheless critical for effective, clear, and persuasive writing. Proper grammar, usage, and correct punctuation makes analysis clearer and therefore more effective. It also shows the reader that the writer has paid close attention to detail, which makes the reader more likely to find the writer credible. Relatedly, communicating in plain language is critical to making sure that “readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” And proper citation—or even better, stylish citation—helps the reader easily understand what …

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

Articles

I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry

Articles

Good writing, I often tell my students, is “anticipating the edits of your boss.” I then clarify that the definition of “boss” in that statement is intentionally expansive. A supervisor at work can count. A teacher in school can count. So can a valued customer or client. he key is to start thinking about two things: 1) the actual people who are going to review your writing; and 2) the likely changes they’ll make to it. By implementing those changes yourself— before the document ever hits your boss’s desk or inbox—you can save them a lot of time and cognitive …

Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry

Articles

Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.

Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …

Investigative Advocacy: The Mechanics Of Muckraking, Patrick Barry

Articles

This essay argues that drafting a complaint is a form of investigative advocacy and that the best of them uphold the tradition of muckraking journalism.

Not Just The Historians: Anne Orford’S Insights And The Suspicion Between International Law And Philosophy, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

International Law and the Politics of History is nothing short of cri de coeur directed at international lawyers and historians, the two disciplinary co-conspirators in international law's so-called turn to history. Rather than embracing what appears to be a mutually beneficial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, Anne Orford instead sees international lawyers as evading their responsibilities as decisionmakers-and indeed makers of both the discipline and its underlying norms-and historians as self-satisfied purveyors of truths that they themselves know are contested and instrumental. As much as she blames historians for acting with blinders, her main audience is international lawyers (mostly the academic …

Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins

Other Publications

The overarching theme of Volume 19 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD is how legal communication shapes the law, and how doers of legal writing can use their resources to make it better. The volume begins with a fascinating article from Aaron Kirschenfeld and Alexa Chew, “Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts.” In their article, Professors Kirschenfeld and Chew shed light on whether the switch from print research to digital research has changed the way that law students and lawyers conduct research. To do so, the article uses the “citation stickiness” metric, which analyzes whether …

Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak

Other Publications

It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …

Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …

Researching Administrative Law, Keith Lacy

Law Librarian Scholarship

Administrative law is a broad subject area concerning the laws and procedures governing administrative agencies. It also encompasses the substantive law produced by those agencies — most commonly in the form of regulations (rules) or agency decisions. This article highlights a few major resources for researching administrative law in the United States.

Introducing David Lefkowitz’S Philosophy And International Law, Andreas Follesdal, Steven R. Ratner

Reviews

David Lefkowitz’s new book Philosophy and International Law: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020) comes at a critical time in the conversation between international law scholars and practitioners, on the one hand, and philosophers, whether legal, moral, or political, on the other. Until about fifteen years ago, philosophical inquiry related to the international legal order was generally limited to a few issues within political and moral philosophy, notably distributive justice and just war theory. Since that time, an expansion has taken place in two directions. First, political and moral philosophers are writing about other aspects of the global political …