Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Constitution As Idea: Defining Describing Deciding In Kelo, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

In June 2005, the Supreme Court in a Five to Four Decision marked its most controversial decision in recent memory. The case of Kelo v. City of New London, set off a fire storm of response to the Court’s ruling that economic development takings satisfied the Fifth Amendment. This essay is about Kelo. It is about how the Court uses words, how the defining ability of words create institutional space in which the Court operates, and which defines things beyond the words.

Aall History Through The Eyes Of Its Presidents, Frank G. Houdek

Publications

On the occasion of the celebration of AALL's centennial in 2006, Professor Houdek offers a personalized history of the Association by presenting reminiscences of those who have served as its president. Collectively, these stories contribute a unique perspective on the important issues that have confronted AALL as an organization and law librarianship as a profession. They also help explain how these individuals became AALL leaders and what the experience meant to them.

On Letters Of Reference As Frames Of Reference, Roderick A. Macdonald, Alexandra Law

Dalhousie Law Journal

Requesting, writing and reading letters of reference are everyday features of academic life. Yet they are neglected as a matter of professorial training and their pedagogical importance is rarely acknowledged. This paper reviews various practical aspects of the reference process, with emphasis on its politics and ethics. It argues that letters of reference frame the lived experience of candidate, writer, reader and community-both for the present and the future.

Caveat Blogger: Blogging And The Flight From Scholarship, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These comments were delivered to the “Symposium on Bloggership” held at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006. Professor Randy Barnett discusses the pros and cons of blogging by legal scholars.

Maccrate (In)Action: The Case For Enhancing The Upper-Level Writing Requirement In Law Schools, Kenneth D. Chestek

ExpressO

In 2001, the American Bar Association amended the Standards for Accreditation of Law Schools to require, for the first time, a “rigorous writing experience after the first year.” During the summer of 2004 the author conducted a nationwide survey to determine how law schools responded to this change. The author found that most schools did little more than to require students to take at least one course which was evaluated by means of an academic paper rather than an examination. The author concludes that this is probably not the response the ABA had hoped for, but suggests that a 2005 …

Scholarship Buddies, Melissa Marlow

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

A Short Note On The Placement Of Adverbs, Jonathan R. Siegel

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Regulation Of Joint Ventures Under Article 81 Of Eu Treaty, Rahul Goel

ExpressO

The paper discusses Article 81 of EU treaty, which focuses on the analysis of the competitive behavior of a joint venture participant in co-operative non-full-function joint venture with focus on telecommunications sector. The Article 81 analyses the joint ventures that fail to satisfy the threshold of the European Commission’s Merger Regulation (ECMR) due to the factors that either they are not fully-functional in nature or lack a community dimension.

Google And Beyond: Finding Information Using Search Engines, And Evaluating Your Results, Elizabeth Geesey Holmes

Presentations

Searching the World Wide Web can be a daunting task. The Web has expanded at such a rapid pace that nobody knows exactly how large it is, but it is safe to say that there are many billions of Web pages residing on servers all over the world. Add to this scenario the task of evaluating information found on the web and choosing between the hundreds of different search tools available – including directories, search engines, meta-searchers, and specialized search engines – and the situation begins to feel overwhelming. Fortunately, learning a few essential concepts of Web searching and site …

Reviewing Writing Samples, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The ability to write well is a critical skill for attorneys, but few law practices have the resources to provide on-the-job help for struggling writers. Consequently, many law firms use writing samples as a way to screen applicants. Every year, the Office of Career Services at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law asks me to give a workshop from the applicant perspective. Although I cover a bit more in the workshop, overall my advice to students about writing samples is pretty straightforvard.

Analyze This: Using Taxonomies To "Scaffold" Students' Legal Thinking And Writing Skills, Christine M. Venter

Mercer Law Review

Legal Writing

Many legal writing teachers speak glibly about training their students to think like lawyers, but have not necessarily tailored their pedagogy to meet that goal. If teachers are not clear and explicit in how they go about teaching students analytical skills, they cannot necessarily expect students to become experts in analysis. While it is true that over the course of their law school careers, most students will develop legal analytical skills through exposure to the law and by means of the Socratic method; teachers can do better. Lawyers pride themselves on precision. This Article argues that legal writing …

Contract As Statute, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati

Michigan Law Review

The traditional model of contract interpretation focuses on the "meeting of the minds." Parties agree on how to structure their respective obligations and rights and then specify their agreement in a written document. Gaps and ambiguities are inevitable. But where contract language exists for the point in contention and a dispute arises as to the meaning of this language, courts attempt to divine what the parties intended. Among the justifications for deferring to the intent of the parties is the assumption that parties know what is best for themselves. Deference also arguably furthers autonomy values. Not all contracts and contract …

Partnering With Decision Makers In Your Institution, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rhetoricized Constitutionality: Describing -- Defining -- Deciding In Kelo, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

This essay is about how the Court uses words, how the defining ability of words creates institutional space in which the Court operates, and which defines things beyond the words.

Barriers In The Land Of The Free, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The best way to get judges to write books is apparently to lure them to the lecterns of prominent lecture series, then turn their remarks into something more permanent. Perhaps the most successful of these schemes was Judge Benjamin Cardozo's 1921 Storrs lectures at the Yale Law School that appeared in the same year as The Nature of the Judicial Process . While a judge on the New York Court of Appeals, before he was elevated to the US Supreme Court in 1932, Cardozo saw two further series of lectures appear in print as The Growth of the Law (1924) …

Ria Federal Tax Handbook 2006 (Book Review), Elizabeth Outler

UF Law Faculty Publications

Review and explanation of the features of the RIA Federal Tax Handbook.

Aall's National Advocacy Efforts, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Articles

What follows is a simplified introduction to legal argument. It is concerned with the scheme of argument and with certain primary definitions and assumptions commonly used in legal opinions and analysis. This discussion is not exhaustive of all the forms of legal argument nor of the techniques of argument you will see and use this year. It is merely an attempt to introduce some commonly used tools in legal argument. It starts, as do most of your first-year courses, with the techniques of the common-law method and then proceeds to build statutory, regulatory, and constitutional sources of law into the …

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? - …

Teaching As Art Form - Review Of The Elements Of Teaching, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The authors of this gem of a book—both retired college teachers who gave their professional lifetimes to teaching—write simply and passionately about what it takes to be an effective teacher, and manage to reduce the key aspects of a complex process down to nine primary elements. In so doing, they provide not only a road map of aspiration for the new teacher, but also signposts of inspiration for the experienced teacher.

Eye Of The Beholder, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Fortunately, some universals about legal audiences help make the task of defining good legal writing easier than defining good fiction writing. Legal writing must be utilitarian, so the emphasis should be on the message rather than on the writing itself. Consequently, to avoid distracting or turning off readers, my students must concentrate as much on what they should not write as on what they actually do write.

When A Rose Isn’T “Arose” Isn’T Arroz: A Guide To Footnoting For Informational Clarity And Scholarly Discourse, William B.T. Mock

International Journal of Legal Information

The essence of footnoting is communication with the reader, but footnote communication that is literally subordinate to the primary text. What a footnote communicates therefore depends upon and extends what the primary text communicates, from telling the reader where to find the source of a reference made in the text through guiding the reader to the different ideas of other members of the invisible college of scholars in the field. By remaining sensitive to the purposes of different footnotes and the needs of the reader, effective footnoting can make a valuable contribution to scholarship.

Teach The Children Well: Incorporating Cultural Literacy Into The Law School Learning Experience, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an examination of what and how we teach in law school. Much attention has been given to the concept of the Socratic Method and whether teaching in this manner "hides the ball" from students. Rather than focusing on whether the ball is hidden, my work shall focus on whether students know what the ball is in the first place.

Trademark Searching Tools And Strategies: Questions For The New Millennium, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

The intent of this discussion is to raise questions about trademark searching which will be discussed in future issues of IDEA. I will lead you through the questions raised by my journey through primarily legal literature in treatises and periodicals on the Lexis and Westlaw platforms.

Keeping Up To Date With Ip News Services And Blogs: Drowning In A Sea Of Sameness?, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

It seems like so many IP related Websites you visit invite you to join their free email list to keep you up to date. Sources span a wide spectrum including governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, consulting services, law firms, commercial publishers and more. These sources span the spectrum from free, to low fee to premium pricing. With all of this information overload and choices, how do you differentiate and choose news sources?

The goals of this article are twofold. Goal one is to present a survey of types and categories of IP news tools available to IP researchers. Since …

The Twenty-Fifth Annual John Marshall International Moot Court Competition In Information Technology And Privacy Law: Brief For The Respondent, 24 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 733 (2006), Timothy T. Hsieh, Jennifer Simmen Lewin, Jerome C. Pandell

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

No abstract provided.