Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Preface, Lisa Porter

St. Thomas Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 25, Issue 1, Fall 2012.

Legal Writing, The Remix: Plagiarism And Hip Hop Ethics, 63 Mercer L. Rev. 597 (2012), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I focus on hip hop music and culture as an access point to teach first-year law students about the academic and professional pitfalls of plagiarism. Hip hop provides a good model for comparison because most entering students are immersed in a popular culture that is saturated with allusions to hip hop. As a point of reference for incoming law students, hip hop possesses a valuable currency as it represents something real, experienced, and relatable.

Significant parallels exist between the cultures of United States legal writing and hip hop, although attempting direct analogies would be absurd. Chief among …

Plagiarism In Lawyers' Advocacy: Imposing Discipline For Conduct Prejudicial To The Administration Of Justice, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In a recent high-profile prosecution, the federal district court criticized defense counsel for filing a post-trial brief that copied passages from previously published material without attribution. The court followed other recent decisions that, since about 2000, have chastised lawyers for briefs marked by plagiarism. Some lawyers had copied passages from earlier judicial opinions that rest in the public domain, and some lawyers (as in the recent prosecution) had copied passages from private sources that are subject to the copyright laws. In either event, courts have labeled lawyers’ plagiarism “reprehensible,” “intolerable,” “completely unacceptable,” and “unprofessional.”

An Immigration Crisis In A Nation Of Immigrants: Why Amending The Fourteenth Amendment Won't Solve Our Problems, Alberto R. Gonzales

Law Faculty Scholarship

The concerns over another terrorist attack, a sluggish economic recovery, high unemployment rates, and state and local budget deficits have propelled immigration policy to the forefront of political debate in the United States. America’s current approach to immigration is an abject failure, undermining the rule of law and our national security. This has prompted various legislative proposals relating to citizenship, including amending the U.S. Constitution to make clear that children born in the United States to unauthorized immigrants are not entitled to birthright citizenship. The Article presents the reasons why these various state and federal level “solutions” are either ineffective …

Capital Punishment, Cultural Competency, And Litigating Intellectual Disability, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

In an illuminating 2008 article in the Hofstra Law Review, Scharlette Holdman and Christopher Seeds helped to bring the concept of culturally competency much needed attention in the field of capital litigation. They presented a view of cultural competency as “at root a collection of knowledge, abilities, and skills.” Because cultural competency allows for translation across cultures, Holdman and Seeds took the position that this skill is a prerequisite for a capital defense attorney who is representing a client of a different ethnicity, nationality, social group, or subgroup in the mitigation phase of a capital case. While cultural competency discourse …

A Law Clinic Systems Theory And The Pedagogy Of Interaction: Creating Legal Learning System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This article introduces a clinical systems approach that reframes professional experience as an interaction with a professional environment. The article encourages clinical faculty and other legal educators to contemplate the pedagogy of systemic interaction when teaching from experience and to then expand professional interactive opportunities within the short period of student participation. Clinical systems theory operates on the premise that students should reframe how they look at their surroundings so that the challenges that make up their professional system are not seen as problems but as means to a solution. Reframing by the student is realized in a clinical system …

Teaching For Lifelong Learning: Improving The Metacognitive Skills Of Law Students Through More Effective Formative Assessment Techniques, 40 Cap. U. L. Rev. 149 (2012), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

With the widespread criticism of legal education and the proposed changes to the American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standards, law schools are looking for ways that they can better teach students to be lawyers. In fact, law schools may be facing a perfect storm for significant changes in legal education with the recent release of two high-profile reports criticizing legal education, the major restructuring of law firms and practice because of the weakening economy, and the push to change the ABA's accreditation standards.

These events highlight the need to prepare law students to be practice-ready and to help make them …

Old Habits Die Hard: Disengaging From The Bluebook, Mark Garibyan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Incoming first-year law students dread many aspects of what lies ahead: the cold calls, the challenging course load, and the general stress that is associated with starting a new phase in one’s life. Most students, however, do not expect that the Bluebook—the citation system used ubiquitously throughout the legal landscape—will inflict “more pain” on them “than any other publication in legal history.” This pain might be a shock to many who are accustomed to the simpler systems utilized in other academic fields. A citation itself is, after all, merely a reference; it is “neither scholarship nor analysis.” Preferably, a system …

Deals And Dispute Resolution: Teaching Research Skills In A Short-Term Simulation Class, Karen Westwood

Faculty Scholarship

My colleague, Reference Librarian Jean Boos, and I were invited to participate in planning a Deals and Dispute Resolution class atWilliam Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, and we were told that the instructors wanted to require the students to research their issues. Our challenge was to come up with a meaningful research experience that wouldn’t devolve into a treasure hunt for the students.

In a situation where the timeframe and setup of a course don’t lend themselves to in-depth research skills instruction, librarians can still fully participate and add value for students. In our experience, this course …

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).

The Public Speaks: An Empirical Study Of Legal Communication, Christopher R. Trudeau

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 24, Issue 3, Summer 2012.

The New Legal Writing: The Importance Of Teaching Law Students How To Use E-Mail Professionally, Kendra Huard Fershee

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

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

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

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. 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.

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 …

Keeping Up With New Legal Titles, Alex Xiaomeng Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Open Access To Legal Scholarship: Dropping The Barriers To Discourse And Dialogue, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the importance of free and open access to legal scholarship and commentary on the law. It argues that full understanding of authoritative legal texts requires access to informed commentary as well as to the texts of the law themselves, and that free and open access to legal commentary will facilitate cross-border dialogue and foster international discourse in law. The paper discusses the obligations of scholars and publishers of legal commentary to make their work as widely accessible as possible. Examples of institutional and disciplinary repositories for legal scholarship are presented, as are the possible impacts of …

Gatekeepers Of Legal Information: Evaluating And Integrating Free Internet Legal Resources Into The Classroom, Jootaek Lee

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

After The Great Recession: Law And Economics' Topics Of Invention And Arrangement And Tropes Of Style, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In the work, The Great Recession and the Rhetorical Canons of Law and Economics,' the Author examined the role of law and economics in the Great Recession of 2008 and onward by examining neoclassical and contemporary law and economics from the perspective of legal rhetoric. The modern, neoclassical school of law and economics-often labeled the "Chicago School"-has had great influence on the American economy and financial system because of its rhetorical canons: mathematical and scientific methods of analysis and demonstration; the characterization of legal phenomena as incentives and costs; the rhetorical economic concept of efficiency; and rational choice theory as …

For The Love Of Parentheticals: The Story Of Parenthetical Usage In Synthesis, Rhetoric, Economics, And Narrative Reasoning, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

What follows is a substantive discussion of the reasons why parentheticals are rhetorically advantageous-in other words, why they are so beloved and often employed in appellate briefs and cases. I will examine the use of parentheticals in citation forms, synthesis, rhetoric, economics, and narrative reasoning in an effort to trace the attraction.

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

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Fundamentals Of Government Information: Mining, Finding, Evaluating, And Using Government Resources, Benjamin J. Keele

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Law And The Argumentative Theory, 90 Or. L. Rev. 837 (2012), Timothy P. O'Neill

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Like many law professors, I have coached my share of moot court teams. As you probably know, in most competitions students either choose or are assigned one side of the case to brief. But for the oral argument segment of the competition, students must argue both sides of the case, “on-brief” and “off-brief,” often in alternate rounds.

At the end of a competition, with their heads still swimming with arguments and counterarguments, students will sometimes ask, “OK, so can you tell us which is the correct side?” I always say, “Of course I can. . . . The correct side …

A Shift To Narrativity, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Slipshod, inconsistent use of core Applied Legal Storytelling terminology muddles its discourse and hampers its growth. Refining the field’s vocabulary is essential, but insufficient, as exclusive focus on the field’s objects of inquiry, such as story and narrative, and the means of creating or conveying them, such as storytelling and narrating, risks losing the “A” in ALS. We need a new focus, one unburdened by the ambiguities and negative associations of existing options that more accurately reflects Applied Legal Storytelling scholars’ unique contributions. A shift to narrativity. Narrativity, as imagined here, is a top-level quality of a legal text or …

Books On My Desk, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

Are there still books that reference librarians need to keep on their desks? Ms. Whisner considers this topic as well as discussing her gradual shift from using reference books in print to using their electronic counterparts

Fifty More Constitutions, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

The U.S. Constitution may get all the attention, but as Ms. Whisner points out, state constitutional law is also important to legal researchers. Unfortunately, the sources for researching state constitutions are more limited and difficult to find. She describes a web site created by the Gallagher Law Library at the University of Washington School of Law that makes available sources of Washington State constitutional history.

People V. Givenni, Colette Siesholtz

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Going To The Experts To Move Students From Skeptics To Believers, Laura Reilly

Other Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: The Will To Survive, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.