Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Freeing The Law, Khelani Clay

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

You Get The Law - And You Get The Law - And You Get The Law, Shannon M. Roddy

Newsletters & Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Update Your Bookmarks! Great Sites For Effective Research, Nancy E. Vettorello

Articles

There are more than one billion websites available online. Many are useful tools for attorneys, so it makes sense to review and refresh your favorite bookmarks regularly. While none of the many free sites offer the sophisticated search abilities of fee-based research services, a few minutes spent exploring free sites can help researchers significantly narrow their searches once they turn to a fee-based system. Remember to always take advantage of the advancesearch option when available on a free site. Free sites are offering increasingly sophisticated search options, such as Boolean and proximity searches, which were previously exclusive to paid services.

Resurrecting (And Modernizing) The Research Treasure Hunt, Nancy E. Vettorello

Articles

First-year associates will spend forty-five percent of their time on legal research; second- and third-year associates will spend thirty percent. And unfortunately, employers find their associates’ research skills lacking. This is not a new complaint. Employers have been complaining for more than a hundred years that recent law graduates cannot research well. None of this is lost on those who teach legal research, who have long debated the best way to do so. Techniques for teaching research have changed over time, and methods once thought appropriate were sometimes later disfavored. Changes were driven both by pedagogy and by the ever-changing …

Finding And Using Images, While Respecting Copyright, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

Text plays a central role in nearly every lawyer’s life. From cases to codes to contracts, words matter tremendously. At times, words alone are insufficient. A well-selected image can evoke emotion and attract attention. While there are literally millions of images online available for use without cost, a well sourced and properly referenced image should recognize and respect the creator’s intellectual property rights. Here are tips for finding and using images, while respecting copyright.

The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson

Publications

Having been honored by a request to contribute to a Symposium honoring my talented friend Alafair Burke, I composed this essay describing the various ways the criminal justice system has been depicted in English-language crime fiction. This survey, necessarily highly selective, considers portrayals penned by writers from Dickens to Tana French. Various dimensions of comparison include the authors’ apparent beliefs about the rule of law (from ridiculously idealistic to uncompromisingly cynical), the characters’ professional perspectives (private detective, police officer, prosecutor, defense lawyer, judge, victim, accused), and the protagonists’ status as institutional insiders or outsiders or occupants of the uncomfortable middle. …

Blurred Lines—Intersexuality And The Law: An Annotated Bibliography, Pat Newcombe

Faculty Scholarship

This Bibliography gathers, organizes, and annotates relevant law review articles (and one monograph) dealing with legal issues concerning intersexuality. Articles are included to introduce researchers to the intricacies involved in the discussion of intersexuality, to examine issues of medical interventions, and to explore possibilities of judicial relief within the existing framework.

After The Override: An Empirical Analysis Of Shadow Precedent, Brian Broughman, Deborah A. Widiss

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Congressional overrides of prior judicial interpretations of statutory language are typically defined as equivalent to judicial overrulings, and they are presumed to play a central role in maintaining legislative supremacy. Our study is the first to empirically test these assumptions. Using a differences-in-differences research design, we find that citation levels decrease far less after legislative overrides than after judicial overrulings. This pattern holds true even when controlling for depth of the superseding event or considering only the specific proposition that was superseded. Moreover, contrary to what one might expect, citation levels decrease more quickly after restorative overrides—-in which Congress repudiates …

Separating Amicus Wheat From Chaff, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl, Adam Feldman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Value Of The Restatement Of Employment Law, Based On 50-State Empirical Analyses And The Importance Of Clarifying Disputed Issues – But With Caveats About The Restatement’S Imperfect Work Product, Scott A. Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Every Algorithm Has A Pov, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

When legal researchers search in online databases for the information they need to solve a legal problem, they need to remember that the algorithms that are returning results to them were designed by humans. The world of legal research is a human-constructed world, and the biases and assumptions the teams of humans that construct the online world bring to the task are imported into the systems we use for research. This article takes a look at what happens when six different teams of humans set out to solve the same problem: how to return results relevant to a searcher’s query …

Research Algorithms Have A Point Of View: The Effect Of Human Decision Making On Your Search Results, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

1l Is The New Bar Prep, Sabrina Defabritiis

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Law school graduates, in growing numbers, are failing the bar exam. This reality is all the more staggering when we consider that these graduates have been preparing for the bar exam since their first year of law school. First-year legal-writing courses teach students specific fundamental skills that are the foundation for success on the bar exam. This Article provides the perspective that the goal of passing the bar exam and teaching law students to think and write like lawyers is a symbiotic relationship. It directly analyzes the correlation between the fundamental skills associated with thinking like a lawyer and successful …

¡Que Viva The Scholar!, Bill Piatt

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

The Worst System Of Citation Except For All The Others, David J.S. Ziff

Articles

Now in its twentieth edition, The Bluebook continues to cast its shadow over the legal profession just as it has for almost 100 years, helping legal writers format their references to authorities in briefs, memoranda, opinions, and law review articles. Previous critiques have offered various theories for why, despite its problems, The Bluebook remains the standard for legal citation. Ivy League elitism, the first-mover advantage, and lawyers’ conservative preference for the status quo have all been offered to explain the seemingly inexplicable: If this system is so terrible, then why are we still stuck with it?

One potential answer to …

A Partial View Of China's Governance Trajectory, Nicholas Calcina Howson

Reviews

Minxin Pei’s new book China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay recites in detail the morass of corruption and collusion in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) party-state finds itself. Encyclopedic in scope, the book addresses corruption, extraction, and network formation in many of modern China’s formal settings—including in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the nomenklatura system, state institutions, enterprises, the investment sector, and the real property market, among others—but also in nonformal contexts such as the rise of the “local mafia state.” The book’s basic storyline is this: the PRC’s radical devolution of intertwined political power and …

Front Matter

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review Volume 12 (2017).

Implementing A First-Year Research Assessment, Savanna L. Nolan

All Faculty Scholarship

University of Baltimore Law librarians do not have a formal role in teaching legal research, but are frequent guest lecturers and recognized research experts. As such, we volunteered to administer UB's first summative assessment in accordance with the recent implementation of ABA Standard 314. This poster shows the steps taken to design, execute, and grade this legal research assessment, as well as how we reported the results to stakeholders.

The assessment had an objective true/false and multiple-choice section, and a subjective essay question. The librarians selected objective questions considering the core legal research competencies identified by RIPS-SIS following the MacCrate …

The Secret To 85% First-Time Bar Passage Rates, Jeffrey S. Kinsler, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

Many law schools have implemented bar preparation courses either as free-standing courses or as an integral part of their academic support program. On April 1, 2016, the ABA Journal published an article on the subject of law school bar preparation courses. Three law schools were featured in that article: Belmont University College of Law ("Belmont"), Florida International University College of Law ("FIU"), and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law ("UMKC"). According to the ABA Journal, these law schools are out-performing their peers on bar exams due in part to in-house bar preparation courses. The story in the ABA …

Is Bar Exam Failure A Harbinger Of Professional Discipline?, Jeffrey S. Kinsler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Two of the reasons students fail the bar exam are lack of diligence and incompetence; these are also the primary reasons attorneys are disciplined. Using bar exam and disciplinary data from Tennessee, this Article substantiates the following theses: (1) The more times it takes a lawyer to pass the bar exam the more likely that lawyer will be disciplined for ethical violations, particularly early in the lawyer’s career; and (2) The more times it takes a lawyer to pass the bar exam the more likely that lawyer will be disciplined for lack of diligence—including non-communication—and/or incompetence.

Religious Freedom: The Original Civil Liberty, Loren E. Mulraine

Law Faculty Scholarship

What exactly is a “civil right?” What is a “civil liberty?” Are they synonymous? To the average American, the term “civil rights” conjures up images of the Jim Crow south, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott, James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, among other historic events of the 1950’s and 60’s. Indeed, these are some of the most iconic events in modern U.S. history. They are also among the most important events in the modern civil rights movement. The legal area …

Collision Course: State Community Property Laws And Termination Rights Under The Federal Copyright Act - Who Should Have The Right Of Way?, Loren E. Mulraine

Law Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recapture rights under copyright law, as well as a primer on the difference between common law and community property law as it relates to property rights in a divorce proceeding. The paper will utilize as a case study the dispute between William “Smokey” Robinson and his former spouse, Claudette Robinson, and provide a statutory solution for future disputes where federal copyright law and state community property laws collide at the intersection of copyright terminations. Specifically, should these newly recaptured rights be treated as a new estate and thus not …

Anti-Profanity Laws And The First Amendment, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

The essay first examines several current state laws that prohibit profanity under certain circumstances. It then details a few recent cases in which individuals were convicted for uttering profanity. The next section explains how profanity can be a part of an unprotected category of speech, such as fighting words, true threats, or harassment. Finally, the essay examines whether such laws and cases comport with First Amendment principles.

Cybersecurity Report Identifies Unique Challenges To Tackling Cybersecurity In Health Care, Deborah R. Farringer

Law Faculty Scholarship

A discussion of the Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force report regarding the preparedness of the health care industry to respond to ever increasing cybersecurity threats.

Send Us The Bitcoin Or Patients Will Die: Addressing The Risks Of Ransomware Attacks On Hospitals, Deborah R. Farringer

Law Faculty Scholarship

“You just have 10 days to send us the Bitcoin. After 10 days we will remove your private key and it's impossible to recover your files.” Message to Medstar employees. Within a span of just a few months in the spring of 2016, fourteen hospitals (four hospital systems) experienced ransomware attacks resulting in an inability for the hospitals to access any of their electronic medical records, including necessary patient data. Knowing that hospitals must have access to this data in order to appropriately treat and monitor patients, those responsible for the attacks requested a bitcoin payment as ransom for the …

99 Problems And The Bitchin' Is One: A Pragmatist's Guide To Student-Edited Law Reviews, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Amicus Curaie, Submitted Susan Akram, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Summary of Argument

Palestinian refugees fall under a legal regime that is distinct from all other refugees in the world. As such, they are covered by a series of special provisions that apply only to them and no other refugees. Their special status resulted from the decisions of the drafters of key international treaties to exclude Palestinian refugees from the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, and to conditionally exclude them from the benefits of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.

Three main reasons …