Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Should Your Law Review Article Have An Abstract And Table Of Contents?: An Empirical Analysis, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

A review of the relevant literature turned up no studies examining the influence of abstracts on citation to law review articles. Nor were studies found examining the influence of tables of contents. To chart this territory, we explore whether abstracts and tables of contents impact the scholarly influence of academic work in the field of legal studies by using a large sample of law review articles published in top 100 law reviews. Part I describes our methodology while Part II reports the results. Part III summarizes the results and discusses them in view of the title question: should your law …

Free Access To Law Of The European Union And Its Member States, Alexis Fetzer

Law Faculty Publications

While Europe may lie across the pond, there are many reasons why today’s practitioner would need to research the law of the European Union or one of its member states. However, with a complex institutional structure and multiple bodies producing various forms of law, researching the law of the EU can seem like a daunting task.

As with any research in an area of unfamiliar law, a good place to begin is with a research guide. Prepared by subject experts, research guides will point to relevant sources for locating primary material and often contain helpful explanations that assist in understanding …

National Conference On Copyright Of State Legal Materials, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

A surge in legislation and the lawsuits on the copyright status of state legal materials raises concerns about principles of open government and free accessibility and use of these materials. On December 2, 2016, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and Boston University School of Law are convening the National Conference of Copyright in State Legal Materials at BU Law. At this conference, all participants will be able to explore the issues surrounding state legal materials access through parallel goals of: Education, Inspiration, and Conversation.

Preserving The Llsdc Legislative Source Book With Perma.Cc, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

With LLSDC’s Legislative Source Book, Rick McKinney was constantly concerned about the collection’s stability, functionality, and availability. With any major revision to the LLSDC.org website, Rick worked to ensure that content was accessible and that he and members of the Legislative Research SIS could keep it updated. In an effort to preserve the Legislative Source Book, the collection’s core elements were captured using the Perma.cc service. These links reference archived versions of each source, presented in parallel to its current form. There is more depth and detail than presented here, which shows the collection’s complex and comprehensive coverage.

Minor Federal Government Regulatory Agencies, Kathleen Klepfer

Law Faculty Publications

Rick McKinney’s “Federal Administrative Law: A Brief Overview” is a succinct and helpful place to find information about rulemaking, common administrative law statutes, and the major administrative agencies. But what about those unsung heroes, the minor regulatory agencies whose necessity—and sometimes purpose—are lost to history? We propose this addendum to Rick’s article to give a couple of these minor agencies their due.

Leveraging Narratives: Communicating Value With Qualitative Content, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

The contemporary law library is embodied by its information resources, physical space, technology infrastructure, and the people who make it all happen. Each of these elements can change dramatically with new information tools, shifting organizational demands and emerging service models.

International And Foreign Tax Research, Jason Zarin

Law Faculty Publications

Tax research often strikes fear in the heart of lawyer and librarian alike, and foreign and international tax research, doubly-so. Fortunately, the resources available for tax research are top-notch, which should enable your research to proceed painlessly.

This article will look at resources and tools for finding model and in-force bilateral tax treaties; foreign tax law in both English and vernacular; and newsletters for keeping abreast of current issues in international and foreign tax law.

John William Wallace (February 17, 1815-January 12, 1884): An Appreciation Upon The Two Hundredth Anniversary Of His Birth, Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

In 2015 we celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of John William Wallace-librarian, court reporter, historian-who was born February 17, 1815 in Philadelphia and died on January 12, 1884. Known mostly as a reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court, this short biography tries to expand on some of the other accomplishments of his life. He was the son of John Bradford Wallace and Susan Binney, sister of the eminent Philadelphia lawyer, Horace Binney and descendant of the two famous printers in Pennsylvania, two William Bradfords in colonial Pennsylvania. Wallace studied law in his father's office and John Sergeant. …

Benefits And Risks Of Legal Research Technologies, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

Appreciating Advanced Algorithms Technologies to enable effective legal research are often extremely sophisticated. Many apply advanced algorithms for searching, sorting, and even predict- ing results. Legal professionals need to understand the benefits and risks associated with these technologies. This is not a matter of knowing how queries are processed. Instead, the need is to under- stand the scope of what is being searched and the nature and reliability of results returned.

In August 2012, the American Bar Association amended commentary to Model Rule 1.1 on general competence, stating that “[t]o maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep …

Designing Spaces: Planning The Physical Space For A Legal Writing Program, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Scholarship Against Desire, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

This article uses my own experience navigating the law review placement process to reflect on the dynamics that shape intellectual life at American law schools. My recent work focuses on the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. At its heart, it is about the law’s role in shaping the precursor to pregnancy—heterosexual sex. When I began researching this topic what I was most curious about was how law and culture might conspire to foster connections that are more loving and less violent, more authentic and less alienated. Pursuing this topic—which would entail exploring big existential questions to which I …

The Three-Act Argument: How To Write A Law Article That Reads Like A Good Story, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

Why do so many law articles—my own included—leave readers cold? One reason may be that they lack fundamental elements that make up a good story. They lack tension. They lack narrative arc. Over my years teaching seminars and exchanging drafts with colleagues, I’ve developed a recipe that helps me organize ideas into a form that better engages the reader. I’ve also found it to be conducive to a richer, more generative writing process.

The recipe is inspired by guides on dramatic plot. It has three parts: exposition, confrontation, and resolution. The exposition introduces the conflict. In many instances, this conflict …

Guest Blog On Skills: Professor Jan Levine's Legislative Drafting Course At Duquesne, Jan M. Levine

Law Faculty Publications

For more than two decades, at three law schools, I have been teaching an advanced legal writing course that builds upon the foundation created in the first-year writing courses and introduces students to new drafting skills, focusing on statutes and statutory drafting. The final project in the course requires students to solve a personally-identified legal or quasi-legal problem by drafting a report and a statute, ordinance, regulation, procedural rule, or a similar solution.

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 …

Legal Writing: A History From The Colonial Era To The End Of The Civil War, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Many Texts Of The Law, Michael Davis, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

This paper contends that even as jurists invoke the official canonic version of the legal text, it is in danger of being replaced for the jurist, as well as for the lay person, if it has not been substituted already, by some apocryphal, inauthentic or casual text. We argue that in addition to the approximate nature of legal knowledge, the overuse of overedited and perverted casebooks, as well as the distribution of legal information among imperfect sources – some official but partial, others inauthentic but highly accessible, and a few reliable but highly unaffordable commercial sources – are largely responsible …

Solving Your Ethical Conundrums: Researching The Rules Of Professional Conduct, Joyce Manna Janto

Law Faculty Publications

Ms. Janto provides a practical guide to researching issues of attorney professional responsibilities using both print and online resources, emphasizing Virginia rules and decisions.

Virginia Cle Sources: Important Practitioner Tools For Forty Years, Gail F. Zwirner

Law Faculty Publications

Observing the 40th anniversary of the Virginia Law Foundation, Ms. Zwirner highlights some of the foundation's continuing legal education publications of frequent value to practitioners.

This article focuses primarily on the deskbook sources that are the go-to materials in many subject areas for Virginia practitioners. The publisher offers all these sources on CD, USB, or downloads. The titles include the forms that practitioners savor as good starting points for their clients’ needs. These forms account for many reference desk success stories for practitioners who rely on Gouldman’s Virginia Forms and are disappointed when that group does not provide the specificity …

Law Libraries And Options Galore, Gail F. Zwirner

Law Faculty Publications

Ms. Zwirner outlines some of the challenges facing the researcher in deciding which resources to use in pursuing information, and makes a case for the continued value of professional law librarians' insight and experience for assisting in these pursuits.

Pointing Out The Power Of Prezi, Part I: Why Consider Prezi, Paul M. Birch

Law Faculty Publications

This article introduces Prezi, the online presentation software which has emerged as a most promising alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Part I offers a basic description of Prezi, points out widely perceived shortcomings of PowerPoint, and considers whether Prezi can remedy them.

Research Strategies, Maureen Moran

Law Faculty Publications

It is 3 a .m. and you are up, prepping for class. Again. You have reading to do for Torts, for Contracts, and for Civil Procedure, and if you fall behind even one day, you will be spending hours late at night for the next few days trying to catch up. Or, worse, you will be unprepared and that will be the day your professor will call on you. And to add to your stress, you have a research project for your legal writing class due in less than two days, and you have not even started. Your professor told …

Foreign And International Legal Research, Maureen Moran

Law Faculty Publications

As you have been learning, the American legal system is only one of hundreds in the world. Each of those legal systems has its own rules, sources, and authorities. But these systems do not exist in a vacuum. What rules govern when two or more States or entities interact? What are the enforcement mechanisms? The study of these questions comprises the fields of foreign law and international law. The purpose of this chapter is not to give you a comprehensive review of all the resources available for researching this vast field of law. Rather, the goal is to give you …

Pointing Out The Power Of Prezi, Part Ii: Learning To Use Prezi, Paul M. Birch

Law Faculty Publications

This article introduces Prezi, the online presentation software which has emerged as a most promising alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Part II provides a tutorial designed to acquaint the user with the basic steps in creating a presentation, and offers additional advice for effective use of Prezi.

Discovering E-Discovery: A Resources Guide, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

E-discovery refers to discovery in civil litigation that focuses on the exchange of information in electronic form. Lainie Crouch Kaiser, a litigation attorney with McDermott Will & Emery, writes that “e-Discovery can be used as an umbrella term for both the legal and operational considerations related to how electronically stored information (ESI) is used in the modern day practice of law.”There are many types of ESI, including e-mail and office documents, voicemail, photos, video, and databases. Attorneys and others who write about e-discovery also include “raw data” as discoverable information. Ronald J. Hedges of Nixon Peabody writes that “[t]echnically, documents …

Finding Legal, Factual, And Other Information In A Digital World, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

This updated listing of Internet sites for legal, factual, and other research offers a combination of more established sites and newer sites developed since the publication of the previous listing. The article began as a comprehensive bibliography of research and other sites for an Advanced Legal Research course and a series of continuing education sessions for legal assistants and paralegals.1 The current version includes sites for primary authorities, both federal and state, as well as URLs for other types of information, such as sites that assist in finding expert witnesses and biographical and background information about individuals.

The George T. Bisel Company And Its Publications (1875-2011), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

Research in the area of law book publishing is an open field of study. Michael Hoeflich's Antebellum Law Book Publishing (2010) is a model work on the rise of the law book industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Philadelphia served as a major city for law book publishing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reflected in Morris Cohen's Bibliography of Early American Law (BEAL).

Legal Periodicals, Indexes, And Other Information Sources, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

This chapter identifies reference resources that might be useful to attorneys and other legal researchers. These resources are valuable for a variety of reasons, including: to locate a definition of a word or to select an alternative word; to locate names and addresses of experts and descriptions of their services; to locate background supporting information about an issue associated with the case such as statistics; to locate information about a judge such as his or her address or, more importantly, to determine something about the judge's temperament or courtroom style; and ID to locate names of court officials such as …

Index To The Journal Of Supreme Court History Volumes 1-35 (1976-2010), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Top 10 Law School Home Pages Of 2011, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

For the third consecutive year, all ABA-accredited home pages are evaluated based on objective criteria, in attempt to find the best sites.

Chapter 9: Fastcase, Gail F. Zwirner

Law Faculty Publications

In February 2005, the Virginia State Bar (VSB) Council approved plans to offer all Virginia lawyers free access to an online legal research program through a portal on the VSB's website. Then-Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell, Sr., considered access to an online research tool a high priority for Virginia attorneys and urged the VSB to provide this kind of service. On June 13, 2005, the Virginia Supreme Court adopted a formal Rule of Court directing the VSB "to contract to provide online computerized legal resea1·ch services to its members."1 In February 2006, the VSB gave its notice of intent to …