Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

"The Evolution Of Government Documents", Jennifer Morgan

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Law Librarianship in the 21st Century, a text for library and information science courses on law librarianship, introduces students to the rapidly evolving world of law librarianship. With no prior knowledge of the law required, students using this book will find practical answers to such questions as: What is law librarianship? How do you become a law librarian? How does law librarianship interrelate with the legal world? Individual chapters provide a concise treatment of such specialized topics as the history of law librarianship, international law, and government documents. Standard topics are dealt with as they apply to the law library, …

Morris L. Cohen: A Bibliography Of His Works, Camilla Tubbs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Speaking With Conviction: The Importance Of Effective And Precise Communications, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Maryland Practice Materials: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, Adeen Postar, Khelani Clay

Contributions to Books

This chapter is intended to cover Maryland Law in its entire complexity and for the most part is intended for current use by practitioners. Whenever possible, it includes references to online sources of material, including LexisNexis, Westlaw, and authoritative sites available on the Internet. We have not included references to WestlawNext as many Maryland specific materials have not been included there as this project was concluding in November 2011.

Reading John Noonan, Jospeh Vining

Articles

John Noonan is a giant in American law and legal practice -- a distinguished legal historian and a true judge. His reflections on the nature of law have a special importance. This essay is a comment on basic elements in his thought.

Research And The Professional : Navigating A Spectrum Of Legal Resources., Erin K Gow

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Legal research is complicated by the growing amount of information available, and there is evidence that legal practitioners require additional training in order to enhance their information literacy and legal research skills. Librarians have a key role to play in developing legal research training, and examples taken from Middle Temple's library are used to illustrate ways in which librarians can offer beneficial training to their library users. This involves assessing the skills, motivation, and needs of the average library user in order to design legal research training that is educationally sound and appealing to the target audience.

Supporting And Promoting Scholarly Life In Turbulent Times, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

One of the most important contributions a law school can make is to the development of the law through scholarly research. As one of the three pillars of being an academic-the other two being teaching and service-producing legal scholarship in one's respective area of expertise is an enterprise that nearly all law schools would like to support. However, during these challenging times for legal education arising from enrollment declines and the resultant adverse budgetary impacts, fully supporting legal scholarship can be particularly challenging. Having served as Associate Dean for Research I at Washington & Lee University School of Law ("W …

Congratulations To The 2014 Recipients Of The Oakley Advocacy And Pagi Awards!, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Uelma - Another First For Colorado, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Justice Gap: Exploring Approaches For Improving Indigent Access To Civil Counsel, Kelsey Atkinson

Pomona Senior Theses

The United States is among one of the only democratic industrialized nations in the world that does not provide guaranteed access to civil representation in cases involving basic human need. This leaves indigent litigants who are at risk of losing their homes or their children left to seek counsel through insufficient pro-bono programs or limited scope legal self-help centers. This thesis provides a history of the struggle for the right to civil counsel, known as Civil Gideon, and explores a variety of proposed solutions to bridge the justice gap for indigent litigants. Despite considerable support for Civil Gideon among scholars …

Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring The Influence Of Legal Research Medium, Stefan H. Krieger, Katrina F. Kuh

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The legal profession is presently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment. Attorneys now locate and access legal authorities primarily through electronic means. Although this shift to an electronic research medium radically changes how attorneys discover and encounter law, little empirical work investigates impacts from the shift to an electronic medium.

This Article presents the results of one of the most robust empirical studies conducted to date comparing research processes using print and electronic sources. While the study presented in this Article was modest in scope, the extent and type of the differences that it reveals are notable. Some of the observed …

Proceed With Extreme Caution: Citation To Wikipedia In Light Of Contributor Demographics And Content Policies, Jodi L. Wilson

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Courts and advocates have shown an increasing willingness to cite to Wikipedia. This trend has piqued the attention of scholars, who have considered the permanency concerns raised by citations to Wikipedia and critiqued how courts and advocates have used Wikipedia. This Article adds to the growing scholarship on the Wikipedia citation trend by examining the contours of the Wikipedia contributor crowd and the principles underlying Wikipedia's content in order to better inform the evaluation of Wikipedia as a potential authoritative source. Part I provides an overview of the Wikipedia citation trend in cases and federal appellate briefs. Part II describes …

Encouraging Engaged Scholarship: Perspectives From An Associate Dean For Research, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter

Articles

Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts …

Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices In U.S. Legal Writing, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

Articles

This Article attempts to use linguistics, specifically text analysis and pragmatics, to help explain how and why lawyers who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) struggle with cohesion in their U.S. legal writing. Then in light of that discussion, it offers a four-step, receptive and productive exercise to engage students in contrastive analysis of cohesive features across languages and cultures.

It begins by distinguishing coherence (top-down flow related to rhetorical preferences and organization of content and argument) from cohesion (bottom-up flow related to the surface features that exhibit connections between clauses). As background, it explores the role of cohesion in …

Front Matter

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review Volume 9 (2014).

Government Internet Resources: Federal, State And Local, David E. Matchen Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This presentation discusses the basic outlines of federal legal research as well as state and local legal research. Discussion of state and local legal research is limited to Maryland, but many states have comparable systems.

College Students And State Voter Id Laws: Can I Vote In The State Where I Attend College? I Have A Student Id Card, Tracey Carter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Presidential debates are purposely held on college campuses because it is well-known that college students are a large voting population who often serve as leaders when it comes to political activism and community involvement. Moreover, when students leave home to attend college, some of them want to vote in their college towns. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1979 landmark decision in Symm v. United States held that students have the constitutional right to register and vote where they attend college. However, despite the Symm’s decision and other constitutional protections, college students also have to be knowledgeable about …

Menu Labeling: The Unintended Consequences To The Consumer, Ellen A. Black

Law Faculty Scholarship

Why are Americans, along with the rest of the most populous nations, more overweight than twenty or thirty years ago? Most nutritionists and scientists agree that the answer is complex and multifaceted, with genetics, exercise, and diet all playing at least a partial role. Americans, for the last thirty years, have been reportedly eating out at restaurants more frequently than they have been eating at home; as a result, the restaurant industry has been blamed, in part, for the rise in obesity, based upon the presumption that more calories are consumed at restaurants than at home. Yet determining the underlying …

Reality Over Ideology: A Practical View Of Special Needs Voucher Programs, Elizabeth Adamo Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

In many school systems across the country, children with disabilities are not receiving the education that they are entitled to by law and need in order to reach their full potential. Although there are certainly triumphant examples of school systems that have succeeded in supporting students with special needs, there are unfortunately far too many examples of neglect, misunderstanding, and, ultimately, failure across the country. Into this struggling system emerges an expanding and difficult challenge that only adds further pressure. Due to the growing numbers of children diagnosed with Autism and the level of expertise required to deal with many …

Resolving The Great Divide In Pregnancy Discrimination, Lynn Ridgeway Zehrt

Law Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court granted certiorari on July 1, 2014, in the Fourth Circuit case of Young v. United Parcel Service, to resolve a fundamental disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over the extent to which employers are required to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Prior to granting certiorari, the Supreme Court invited the Solicitor General to submit an amicus curiae brief providing the position of the United States. It was the opinion of the Solicitor General that the Fourth Circuit “erred in holding that petitioner failed to establish a prima facie …

Twenty Years Of Compromise: How The Caps On Damages In The Civil Rights Act Of 1991 Codified Sex Discrimination, Lynn Ridgeway Zehrt

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article takes a novel approach and reexamines the legislative history surrounding the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 with a central focus on exploring the issue of capped damages. Part I begins by briefly contrasting and summarizing the diverging remedies available under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII. The article then shifts in Part II to an examination of the political climate and legislative history that forged the enactment of the 1991 Act, paying particular attention to the debate surrounding damages. This history reveals that many members of Congress had a discriminatory motive in capping damages …

Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company’s American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West’s digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring’s scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were …

Rife With Latent Power: Exploring The Reach Of The Irs To Determine Tax-Exempt Status According To Public Policy Rationale In An Era Of Judicial Deference, Amy L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarship

Using the case of Bob Jones University v. United States as a springboard, this article contends that the IRS has the legal authority to revoke the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt statuses of any institution that the IRS deems to be in violation of public policy. The first step to such an expansion might be to apply to private, religious universities that practice discrimination in areas other than race (e.g. gender and sexual orientation). This article traces the background and analysis of the Supreme Court decision in Bob Jones and how the Court left the door open for the IRS to make other …

The Quest For Finality: Five Stories Of White Collar Criminal Prosecution, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium article, Professor Dervan examines the issue of finality and sentencing. In considering this issue, he argues that prosecutors, defendants, and society as a whole are drawn to the concept of finality in various ways during criminal adjudications. Further, far from an aspirational summit, he argues that some outgrowths of this quest for finality could be destructive and, in fact, obstructive to some of the larger goals of our criminal justice system, including the pursuit of truth and the protection of the innocent. Given the potential abstraction of these issues, Professor Dervan decided to discuss the possible consequences …

Finding The Lost Involuntary Public Figure, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article begins in Part I through observation of the beginning and development of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the constitutional limitations imposed upon defamation actions under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Part II of the Article then briefly sets forth the constitutional framework that the Supreme Court imposed in 1974 on defamation actions in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. The Article then addresses in Part III how the pressures of the First Amendment have eroded the structure that Gertz built. In doing so, Part III specifically explores the expanding definition of who constitutes a public official …

Creating And Teaching A Specialized Legal Research Course: The Benefits And Considerations, Erika Cohn

All Faculty Scholarship

This article outlines the author's experience creating and teaching a specialized legal research course. It includes the reasons for offering such a course, tips for selecting a topic and developing a syllabus, getting the course approved, creating student interest, developing a teaching plan, and evaluating the course.

Not Just For Scouting Anymore: Digital Badges For Legal Research Skills, Alcasid Hannah, Susan David Demaine, Catherine A. Lemmer, Benjamin J. Keele

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.