Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Sending The Message To Students That Revising Means Seeing Their Work Through New Eyes, Patricia Grande Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In my experience, students have a narrow view of what revision entails. They typically equate it with polishing–changing words, editing grammar, and fixing citation. In their minds, it is the final clean-up stage in the process before the assignment is due. If we want to encourage our students to treat it differently–that is, to treat it as an opportunity to discover new legal arguments, resolve dissonance in their analyses, and question their original decisions–then our comments on their drafts need to show that revision entails seeing their work through new eyes.

The Unwritten Article, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

A law review article without footnotes? Unthinkable. But what about an article with only footnotes - and footnotes to footnotes? Thinkable. And here it is.

Performance Scholarship And The Internal Revenue Code, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

If we can have performance art-and we can-why not performance scholarship? This commentary suggests an entirely new scholarly emphasis for legal academics. (OK, it's not entirely new, but it's new for those of us not teaching trial practice.)

Law Review Correspondence: Better Read Than Dead?, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

These essays were part of a mini-symposium, “Of Correspondence and Commentary,” published by the Connecticut Law Review. At the time, a number of prominent law reviews had begun to publish “correspondence,” shorter pieces generally commenting on work published in the reviews. Whatever they were called, however, these pieces looked an awful lot like articles, complete with footnotes, titles with colons, and other law-review-type stuff. The author used the creation of correspondence sections to ruminate on the nature of legal scholarship, as published in student-edited law reviews, and in particular to wonder whether authors were using correspondence sections as backdoor ways …

A Call For A New Buffalo Law Scholarship, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

Those who haven't been paying attention to buffalo law should.

The Law Review Manuscript Glut: The Need For Guidelines, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

Legal academics generally publish in student-edited journals that have no sole-submission requirement, and it is common for authors to submit articles to dozens of journals at a time. As a result, law reviews are buried in manuscripts. Most manuscripts cannot even be looked at, much less evaluated, and there’s not much reason for evaluation anyway: a journal has little chance to publish any particular article. In short, the legal publication system is broken. (Indeed, given the ease and trivial cost of electronic submission - why not submit the article on artichoke law to Yale as well as So-So State? - …

Integrating Contract Drafting Skills And Doctrine, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

In February 2006, I participated in the Symposium, Teaching Writing and Teaching Doctrine: A Symbiotic Relationship?, at Brooklyn Law School. I prepared some personal and unscientific observations about the challenges of concurrently teaching legal doctrine and contract drafting. Obviously, there is a rich literature on these topics that I did not try to address; instead, my goal was simply to acknowledge my first-hand experiences wrestling with these challenges and discuss some specific solutions I have tried. This brief Essay recaps my presentation.

Contract Drafting Courses For Upper-Level Students: Teaching Tips, Robin A. Boyle

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)
/="/">Contract-drafting courses are gaining in popularity in law school, and they are a pleasure to teach. On July 20–21, 2005,Northwestern University School of Law provided the location and Judith A. Rosenbaum provided on-site assistance in hosting the first national conference, in recent times, on the topic of contract drafting. The conference was aptly called “Teaching Contract Drafting.” Approximately 100 participants attended, which was significantly more than the organizers expected. The conference’s large attendance indicates the need and growing enthusiasm for guidance on how to develop and teach contract drafting courses. The organizers of the conference, Susan Irion, Richard …

Law Review Article Placement: Benefit Or Beauty Prize?, Dennis J. Callahan, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Advancing Public Interest Practitioner Research Skills In Legal Education, Randy J. Diamond

Faculty Publications

The information revolution has dramatically altered the legal research landscape, expanding the bounds of legal authority. Practitioner research requires more than traditional legal research. It also encompasses factual investigation, non-legal information, interdisciplinary and audience research. Many new lawyers are ill-prepared to research novel and unusual situations, to cope with unwritten laws and local customs, and to meet shifting authority expectations.

Introduction: A Good Idea, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

With this volume, the editors of the Hofstra Law Review introduce a new section: "Ideas." "Ideas" will serve as the vehicle for short pieces—from three to ten pages in length and having a minimal number of footnotes—on topics of interest to scholars and practitioners. There will be no subject-matter restrictions and no requirement that the pieces relate to one another. "Ideas" will not be a symposium, but a collection of brief observations on important legal questions. The editors hope to attract submissions from the academy and from prominent members of the bench and bar as well.

The inauguration of this …

Damages As Narrative, Melody Richardson Daily

Faculty Publications

The traditional approach to legal instruction in America-the casebook method-requires students to read hundreds of appellate decisions, most of which include equally terse accounts of human suffering. How might this pedagogical approach affect future lawyers? Can reading a book like Damages help law students develop the ability to empathize with their clients?

Negotiating And Analyzing Electronic License Agreements, Duncan E. Alford

Faculty Publications

Mr Alford analyzes license agreements for electronic resources and suggests certain negotiation points to consider when entering into such an agreement. He begins by describing the results of a survey of law librarians about their preparation for and techniques used when negotiating electronic license agreements and the legal strategies used by publishers to support the licensing of electronic information. After reviewing selected principles of licensing issued by library associations and several standardized electronic license agreements, he identifies provisions in a typical agreement that should concern libraries and suggests certain arguments to use in negotiating terms more favorable to the library.

A Compendium Of Clever And Amusing Law Review Writings -- An Idiosyncratic Bibliography Of Miscellany With In Kind Annotations Intended As A Humorous Diversion For The Gentle Reader, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

The world of the American law review resembles Middle Earth for all its strange inhabitants, secret rituals, and foreboding folklore. The depth and breadth of law review literature defies facile characterization, but it can be stated without fear of contradiction that the truly clever or amusing law review article is the quintessential rara avis. Law review articles - and the people who write them and the people who read them - are serious to a fault.

Indeed, whenever a judge, a lawyer, a law professor, or a law student writes something truly funny he or she runs the risk …

The Bard And The Bench: An Opinion And Brief Writer's Guide To Shakespeare, Robert Peterson

Faculty Publications

This work is a legal brief writer's and opinion drafter's guide to Shakespeare. It collects and catalogues by topic citations to plays, poems, or passages that are actually found in judicial opinions. This essay also suggests a few uncited orphans deserving a home in brief or opinion. The catalogue is web based; the reader may search it in its electronic format or download it for old-fashioned browsing.

The Value Of Narrative In Legal Scholarship And Teaching, Jean C. Love

Faculty Publications

Storytelling-particularly storytelling written from an "outsider's" perspective-is a new form of legal writing that appears with increasing frequency on the pages of law reviews and specialized legal journals. At the same time, critics are questioning whether storytelling deserves to be classified as a form of legal scholarship. Perhaps storytellers are to be regarded as talented and creative writers, but do they truly deserve to be called legal scholars? At first, the debate was local, arising in the context of the deliberations of appointments committees and tenure committees. Now the debate is national, and it is being conducted on the pages …

Researching Cases On The Web, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Scholarship About Teaching, Jonathan L. Entin

Faculty Publications

This essay draws on that experience, focusing on approximately half a dozen particularly good articles that have appeared in the Journal during my editorial tenure. Most of these describe new ideas, offering detailed information for the curious reader who might want to emulate the author's approach or simply to learn what others in the legal academy are doing. Typically, however, these papers contain little or no meaningful assessment or evaluation. "Descriptive" is too often a pejorative term of dismissal. But good description is often an essential first step toward understanding. Because I believe that more rigorous evaluation could add to …

Teaching Law Students Through Individual Learning Styles, Robin A. Boyle, Rita Dunn

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Teaching can be rewarding, but it can also be frustrating when some students fail to grasp the material. Professor Robin A. Boyle of St. John’s University School of Law has been teaching Legal Research and Writing in small sections of approximately twenty to thirty students for four years. She, like many of her similarly exasperated colleagues, has repeated the same course content by using either lecture or collaborative learning, and has observed some students doing well, whereas others continued to perform poorly. Then, Dr. Rita Dunn was introduced to the law school faculty and suggested that law professors incorporate …

Book Review Of In The Opinion Of The Court, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Hibbitts' Last Writes?, I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Empirical Legal Scholarship: Reestablishing A Dialogue Between The Academy And Profession, Craig Allen Nard

Faculty Publications

Should legal academics begin to engage in a greater degree of empirical scholarship, I believe that the gap between law schools and the profession will not only cease to distend, but actually will begin to contract. If what I assert is true, or even partially true, the question remains: Why is there such a paucity of empirical legal scholarship?

Part I of this article discusses the importance and value of the empirical method and empirical scholarship by briefly exploring the philosophy of Pragmatism and its influence on the law. Thereafter, part II explores why legal academics do not engage in …

Integrating Legal Writing Into Civil Procedure, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Law teachers increasingly recognize that practical skills training deserves a place in traditional courses throughout the curriculum.' The literature regularly reports proposals to integrate practical skills components into both first-year and upperclass courses. The array of skills includes mediation, negotiation, interviewing and counseling, writing and drafting, case management, and advocacy

Creating An Expert System For Legislative History Research: Project Clear's 'Lexpert', I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

Professor Hardy describes techniques that help to automate the creation of Lexpert, an expert system for giving advice about legislative history research.

Turning Online Time Into Quality Time: Searching Ohio Case Law On Lexis And Westlaw, Randy J. Diamond

Faculty Publications

This article discusses some of the lesser known complexities of LEXIS and WESTLAW and the necessity for evaluating these systems critically. Sample searches highlight the major differences between WESTLAW's and LEXIS's search protocols. Comparable features of each system are examined to show how users can improve the quality of their search results and to warn of unintended consequences when users misapply them. Strategies for formulating searches that retrieve relevant cases and prevent the exclusion of potentially relevant cases are considered, along with the economics of online searching. Although the searches presented are limited to Ohio case law, they are adaptable …

Why Legal Research Training Is So Bad: A Response To Howland And Lewis, I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Project Clear's Paper Choice: A Hypertext System For Giving Advice About Legal Research, I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

Project CLEAR-Computers in Legal Education: Assistance with Research-applies computer techniques to teaching and advising students about legal research. "Hypertext" is a software technique appropriate both for creating information structures that users can browse through, and for creating question-and-answer decision trees that provide specific advice to users. These two hypertext techniques have been put together in Project CLEAR's Paper Choice, a computer program that provides knowledge and gives advice to law students about legal research.

Voices, Values And Community: Some Reflections On Legal Writing, Frank Pommersheim

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Writing From A Legal Perspective By George D. Gopen, Douglas E. Abrams, Jay Wishingrad

Faculty Publications

Criticism of legal writing has come with increasing frequency and stridency in recent years from lawyers and nonlawyers alike. Judges have criticized the writing of advocates, and lawyers have complained about the writing of judges and other lawyers. Law professors have bemoaned both their students' inability to write the King's English5 *1062 and their own tendency to write ‘unintelligible gibberish.’ And all law school graduates have been pilloried by a general public that has grown increasingly resentful of the unnecessary complexity of ‘legalese.

Employment Discrimination Law, Cynthia Mertens

Faculty Publications

Employment Discrimination Law must be on the desk of every practitioner in this field and in all law libraries. The volume is also an excellent teaching tool. There is no question that the authors' two primary objectives have been met; the book is of "significant and equal value to practitioner and student and of substantial value to the sophisticated non-lawyer," and is "balanced and non-partisan.