Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Bluebook At Eighteen: Reflecting And Ratifying Current Trends In Legal Scholarship, A. Christine Hurt

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Six Steps To A Smaller World: Finding International Law From Your Desktop, Jennifer Sekula

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing Triage: Self-Edit To Solve The Most Common Style Problems, Robert S. Anderson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses one of the most common style problems in legal writing: subject-verb issues that produce confusing or overlong sentences. It then prescribes a simple approach to curing the problem in quick, step-by-step fashion.

Have You Seen The New Library Bar?: Designing A Legal Research Toolbar, Jennifer L. Wondracek

UF Law Faculty Publications

It seems like more and more people today are selecting their legal research results based on ease of access rather than the completeness of the results. After hearing one too many third-year law students say "I researched my entire paper on Google," I set off to create a tool that would satisfy both the desire for speed and the need for complete and authoritative research results. The tool is a legal research toolbar that integrates into a web browser and provides constant and quick access to library-sanctioned websites and databases. This paper walks readers through the design process of the …

Legal Research And Legal Education In Africa: The Challenge For Information Literacy, Vicki Lawal

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This paper analyses legal research within the context of legal education in Africa, it examines some of the challenges of electronic legal research in view of the influences of online legal electronic resources and Computer Assisted legal Research (CALR) and the importance of information literacy in addressing some of the issues raised especially with regards to undergraduate legal education.

How To Present Web-Based Legal Information: Towards Library Web 2.0, Sasha Skenderija

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

The World Wide Web has rapidly evolved from a technological into a social medium. Web 2.0 has become a metaphor for the distributed and decentralized collaboration networks on a global scale. With the recent trends of new media development, the sources available have reached a critical mass resulting in an unprecedented information overload. The urgent challenge to all information professionals, in this case law librarians, is no longer availability and direct provision of resources, but rather the filtering and highlighting. As an example of the utilization of Web 2.0 values, the Cornell Law Library (CLL) recently re-launched its website. The …

Keynote Address: Remarks At The Workshop On Tapping Into The World Of Electronic Legal Knowledge , Muna Ndulo

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

Professor Muna Ndulo of Cornell Law School presented the keynote address at the 2007 Starr Workshop, “Tapping into the World of Electronic Legal Knowledge.” The workshop took place at Cornell Law School October 7-10, 2007 and was co-sponsored by the Starr Foundation, New York University Law Library, and Cornell Law Library.

Professor Ndulo addresses the topic of new information technologies and their importance to legal research and teaching.

U.S. Law And Legal Research, Pat Court

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

This presentation on the basics of U.S. law offers a general outline of the fundamental sources of U.S. law. With a foundation in the three branches of government and the laws, court decisions, and regulations that flow from them, the speaker demonstrated free and fee-based electronic resources frequently used for legal research. The focus is on Westlaw, LexisNexis, PACER the Public Access to Court Electronic Records), GPOAccess, and the official U.S. Supreme Court web site. While the web has made it possible for universities, governments, courts, and others to put user-friendly law on the web for free, the most extensive …

Demand For Electronic Legal Information At The University Of Botswana , Kgomotso F. Radijeng

Starr Workshop Papers (2007)

The advent of technology has changed the way legal research is conducted. The study looks at the availability of electronic legal information at the University of Botswana, perceptions of the university legal community about such information, challenges affecting access to electronic legal information and recommended solutions to those challenges. The paper also looks at the contribution that the library can make in alleviating the challenges and addressing the different perceptions by the legal community.

Survey Of Cooperation Among Clinical, Pro Bono, Externship And Legal Writing Faculty, Susan Wawrose, Sarah E. Ricks

School of Law Faculty Publications

Recent surveys by a committee of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) show that many legal writing faculty around the country are engaged in exciting and creative collaborations with their colleagues in clinics and in externship and pro bono programs. Faculty from these different programs work together around course and curriculum planning, on large and small teaching initiatives, and on scholarship. Whether the proper metaphor for this type of collaboration is collision or something more constructive, the inspiring fact is that these collaborations are taking place.

Two Educator Perspectives On Legal Research Methods, Ellen Boegel, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Creating Online Tutorials: Five Lessons Learned, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the fall of 2005, two librarians, a legal research and writing program director, and an instructional technologist at Wayne State University received a grant to create online tutorials introducing novices to the basics of legal research. Tutorials were planned on subjects that the library and the legal research and writing program had traditionally covered jointly via library workshops, coordinated with classroom instruction for first-year law students. Since the mission of the law library is to support campus-wide activity and to assist members of the general public with legal research needs, the content of the tutorials was designed to serve …

Six Degrees Of Cass Sunstein, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means …

Road To Legal Writing Paved With Attention To Reader, Kathleen Elliott Vinson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Writers need to write for their reader, not themselves. Writers should think of their reader when drafting any document. Writers should be kind to their readers by being clear, concise, thorough and precise. This Article discusses ways writers can guide their reader throughout a document and make their points explicit and obvious.

And Your Point Is? Write Directly, Robert S. Anderson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article suggests two strategies for making your writing more direct: (1) make the reader a promise to be direct in the introduction of your piece; and (2) keep that promise by organizing the material to match the preview provided in your introduction and adopting a style that does not waste words.

Rebooting The Approach To Teaching Research: Embracing The Computer Age, Carrie Teitcher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Centrality Of Metaphor In Legal Analysis And Communication: An Introduction, David T. Ritchie

Mercer Law Review

Law, as a domain of human enterprise, is fundamentally discursive in nature. As such, understanding the elements of legal discourse, both analytical and communicative, is vital to understanding the nature of the enterprise. Metaphorical reasoning, and the communication of that reasoning, is one such element. Perhaps metaphor is one among many elements of legal discourse. In this view, metaphor theory would take its place alongside logic, narrative theory, rhetoric, and so on.

Legitimacy, Selectivity, And The Disunitary Executive: A Reply To Sally Katzen, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Michigan Law Review

This reply addresses the thoughtful comments that former OIRA Administrator Sally Katzen has provided on our Article, Inside the Administrative State: A Critical Look at the Practice of Presidential Control. Our Article is the first to investigate the agency perspective on White House involvement in agency rule-making. We interviewed 30 of the 35 top political officials in the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") during the George H.W. Bush ("Bush I") and the William J. Clinton Administrations during 1989-2001. Prior to our study, empirical studies of White House involvement in agency rule-making had focused almost exclusively on the White House side, …

Levels Of Metaphor In Persuasive Legal Writing, Michael R. Smith

Mercer Law Review

No abstract provided.

From The Treasurer: Aall Funds Initiatives, Joyce Manna Janto

Law Faculty Publications

Report of AALL financial status at the end of FY 2005-2006.

The Imagination Of James Boyd White, Lee C. Bollinger

Michigan Law Review

For several decades, James Boyd White has been a unique voice in the law. It is a voice of extraordinary intellectual range, of erudition and of deep commitment to a life of self-understanding and of humane values. His point of access is language - all language, in every context. Armed y a lifetime of thought about words, he justifiably has regarded no field or discipline or communicative activity as foreign and outside his ken. Whoever reads him must feel his sense of intellectual empowerment that our world, sectioned as it is by expertise, would deny us.

Educative Friendship - A Personal Note, Jeanne Gaakeer

Michigan Law Review

In 1992, when I started my doctorate research in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature, The Legal Imagination was one of the first books I read. To European eyes, it was a most unusual book since in continental legal theory in those days, the Anglo-analytical tradition was predominant, and French deconstruction had for some time been the up-and coming stream. Fascinated as I became with Professor White's works, I decided to try to get in contact with him in order to ask him about the genesis of his ideas. So much for the dangers of the intentional fallacy Whimsatt …

Speech, Silence, And Ethical Lives In The Law, Robin West

Michigan Law Review

As his many appreciative readers know, James Boyd White brought his learning to bear on the relation between ethical living and ethical speaking, and particularly as it pertains to how we live and speak in law. His prodigious writing, teaching, and speaking career, as far as I can tell, was motivated by a singular, passionate belief: that the human capacity for language can and should serve as a bridge from mind to mind and spirit to spirit, so that we might cohabit the earth not only peaceably, but with the pleasures and grace of each other's company. Language, White taught, …

A Reality Check On An Empirical Study: Comments On "Inside The Administrative State", Sally Katzen

Michigan Law Review

Presidential control is the term used for the process (or some would say, the model) by which agency decision-making (more particularly, rulemaking) is brought under the direction of the president to "render such decision- making accountable and effective." Until now scholars, who have generally endorsed both the theory and the practice of the process, have written from the perspective of those who exercise presidential control - those at the White House or the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ("OIRA"). In a recent article in the Michigan Law Review, Lisa Schultz Bressman and Michael Vandenbergh ("the authors") decided to …

Should Patent Infringement Require Proof Of Copying?, Mark A. Lemley

Michigan Law Review

Patent infringement is a strict liability offense. Patent law gives patent owners not just the right to prevent others from copying their ideas, but the power to control the use of their idea--even by those who independently develop a technology with no knowledge of the patent or the patentee. This is a power that exists nowhere else in intellectual property (IP) or real property law, but it is a one that patentees have had, with rare exceptions, since the inception of the Republic. In an important paper in the Michigan Law Review, Samson Vermont seeks to change this, arguing …

God Vs. The Gavel: A Brief Rejoinder, Douglas Laycock

Michigan Law Review

I recently reviewed God vs. the Gavel by Professor Marci Hamilton, and she published a brief response. My review briefly summarized the book and then made three principal points, addressing Hamilton's institutional competence thesis, her "no-harm" principle, and the remarkable number of legal and factual errors in the book. In this reply, I will review each of these points in turn.

Legal Information Management In A Global And Digital Age: Revolution And Tradition, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article presents an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries, and describes some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. It discusses the impact of globalization and the Internet on international and foreign law information, the free access to law movement and open access scholarship, and mass digitization projects, then turns to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long term access to born digital legal information and authentication of official digital legal information It finally discusses new roles for librarians, called upon to evaluate the quality of information; teach legal research methodology; and be advocates …

From The Reference Desk To River City: A Bibliography Of The Writings Of Robert C. Berring, Frank G. Houdek

Publications

Professor Houdek documents the prolific and eclectic body of work of Robert C. Berring, including the books, chapters, articles, and assorted other materials he has written to date on subjects ranging from law libraries and legal information to legal research instruction and Chinese law and history.

Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The “Progressive” Peril, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

In "How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution," Richard Epstein bemoans the growth of a dominant big government. How Progressives should receive a warm reception from the audience, lawyers and laypeople alike, who view the New Deal as a mistake of epic proportions. For the rest of us, significant gaps will still remain between, on the one hand, our understanding of the nation’s past and of the complex nature of constitutional lawmaking and, on the other, Epstein’s version of the nature of twentieth-century reform and Progressive jurisprudence.

Suggestions On How To Conduct Empirical Research: A Behind-The-Scenes View, Robin A. Boyle, Joanne Ingham

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The conference theme of empirical research at the 2006 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting, held in Washington,D.C., indicated an interest on the part of doctrinal and skills professors to conduct their own studies. The conference title, Empirical Scholarship:What Should We Study and How Should We Study It?, along with the plentiful workshops on the topic, evidenced the acceptance in the academe of empiricism.As a researcher noted, “Empirical legal scholarship … is arguably the next big thing in legal intellectual thought.”

Assisting legal writing professors with their growing interest in conducting empirical studies, the authors presented at the …