Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall—Biased Impartiality, Appearances, And The Need For Recusal Reform, Zygmont A. Pines

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The article focuses on a troubling aspect of contemporary judicial morality.

Impartiality—and the appearance of impartiality—are the foundation of judicial decision-making, judicial morality, and the public’s trust in the rule of law. Recusal, in which a jurist voluntarily removes himself or herself from participating in a case, is a process that attempts to preserve and promote the substance and the appearance of judicial impartiality. Nevertheless, the traditional common law recusal process, prevalent in many of our state court systems, manifestly subverts basic legal and ethical norms.

Today’s recusal practice—whether rooted in unintentional hypocrisy, wishful thinking, or a pathological cognitive dissonance— …

Antitrust Changeup: How A Single Antitrust Reform Could Be A Home Run For Minor League Baseball Players, Jeremy Ulm

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to protect competition in the marketplace. Federal antitrust law has developed to prevent businesses from exerting unfair power on their employees and customers. Specifically, the Sherman Act prevents competitors from reaching unreasonable agreements amongst themselves and from monopolizing markets. However, not all industries have these protections.

Historically, federal antitrust law has not governed the “Business of Baseball.” The Supreme Court had the opportunity to apply antitrust law to baseball in Federal Baseball Club, Incorporated v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs; however, the Court held that the Business of Baseball was not …

Law Library Blog (October 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

David Versus Godzilla: Bigger Stones, Jerry Ellig, Richard Williams

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

For four decades, U.S. Presidents have issued executive orders requiring agencies to conduct comprehensive regulatory impact analysis (RIA) for significant regulations to ensure that regulatory decisions solve social problems in a cost-beneficial manner. Yet experience demonstrates that agency RIAs often fail to live up to the standards enunciated in executive orders and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) oversees agency compliance with the executive orders, but OIRA is about half the size it was when it was established in 1980. Regulatory agency staff outnumber OIRA staff by a ratio of 3600 …

Errors And Insights, Patrick Barry

Articles

In Seeing What Other's Don't, the psychologist Gary Klein suggests that only focusing on reducing errors limits our ability to improve. We also need to spend time increasing insights. This short essay applies Klein's approach to writing and editing.

(Not The) Same Old Story: Invisible Reasons For Rejecting Invisible Wounds, Jessica Lynn Wherry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thousands of former military servicemembers have been discharged with other-than-honorable discharges due to misconduct that can be traced to a mental health condition. These veterans may request a post-discharge change to their discharge characterization—known as a “discharge upgrade.” Discharge review boards consider discharge upgrade requests and typically (90-99% of the time) deny the requests. In the past few years, the Department of Defense has issued new policy guidance partly in response to the low grant rate and to specifically address the growing understanding of the relationship between misconduct and mental health conditions for military servicemembers. The policy guidance requires the …

Thurgood Marshall In Tennesee: His Defense Of Accused Rioters, His Near-Miss With A Lynch Mob, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

n “Thurgood Marshall in Tennessee: His Defense of Accused Rioters, His Near-Miss with a Lynch Mob,” David L. Hudson Jr. examines a pivotal yet lesser-known episode in the early career of Thurgood Marshall arising from the 1946 Columbia Race Riot in Columbia, Tennessee. The article recounts how a dispute between an African-American Navy veteran and a white store employee escalated into racial violence, mass arrests of more than 100 African Americans, and sweeping law enforcement actions in the Black community. Marshall, working alongside attorneys Z. Alexander Looby, Maurice Weaver, and others, joined the defense of 25 African-American men charged with …

Working On A Literary Text While Teaching Russian In The National Audience Of Law Faculties, Nasiba Niyazova

Review of law sciences

The article considers the need to use a literary text in the study of the Russian language. This will optimize the educational process and improve the quality of education and teaching in the national audience.

Book Review Of Lawyering Skills In The Doctrinal Classroom: Using Legal Writing Pedagogy To Enhance Teaching Across The Law School Curriculum, O.J. Salinas

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Resources For Foreign, Comparative, And International Legal Research, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

In our increasingly globalized world, a legal issue outside of American domestic law can pop up in a variety of circumstances. Commercial transactions, marriage and custody issues, immigration statuses, and more may involve the law of another nation or be governed by an international treaty. This article outlines some resources to help you tackle foreign, comparative, and international legal issues, whenever they arise.

References To Children's Stories And Fairy Tales In Judicial Opinions And Written Advocacy, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Jones v. State is typical of recent state and federal court decisions that have spiced substantive or procedural points with references to classic children’s stories or classic fairy tales. These literary resources have won places in American popular culture and are likely generally familiar to readers, especially when (as in Jones) the court provides any necessary context explaining the resource’s relevance to the decision.

In previous Journal of The Missouri Bar articles, I have written about judges’ invocation of an array of influential cultural markers that are generally familiar to Americans. These articles explored written opinions that accompanied substantive or …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Pause, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

أدوات الحجاج القانوني وتقاناته: الأحكام في المحاكم القطرية نموذج, Ahmad Safar

Al Jinan الجنان

Court decrees are significantly peculiar due to the unique nature of the juridical system and its personnel. Such decrees are governed by logic and the use of certain terms and linguistic patterns which are completely different than those of debates and other speeches which are used for political campaigns, advertisements, marketing and other communication purposes. The legal language is a language of conviction which relies on rules of logic, solid argument and reasoning. Therefore, a court judgment is a manifestation of the truth, which the judge reached to after deep critical thinking and argumentative reasoning. Thus the language that the …

Law Library Blog (August 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Rhetorical Repetition, Patrick Barry

Articles

When it comes to persuading judges, boardrooms, or even just co-workers, many lawyers shy away from repetition. They remain committed to the idea, often developed in college, that good writing is associated with having (and showing) a big vocabulary. They mistakenly think the best thesaurus wins. This essay explores that error and offers ways to correct it.

Unsettled Questions In Student Speech Law, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

More than fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court famously proclaimed in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” In subsequent decades, the Supreme Court reduced the level of free-speech protections for public school students, but Tinker is still the lodestar decision.

There remain several areas of uncertainty regarding the scope of student (K–12) First Amendment rights. This Article addresses three of those main areas: (1) whether a student’s speech can be limited by the unruly behavior …

In The Midst Of Change, A Few Truths Remain—A Review Of Trazenfeld And Jarvis’S Florida Legal Malpractice Law, Jan L. Jacobowitz Ms.

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming.

Foreword: Legal Essays: A Checklist, Reagan Seidler, Sarah Macleod

Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies

Good legal writing is more science than art. It persuades not by its rhetoric but by the impregnability of its research method. It answers its question using a testable, falsifiable, and repeatable method, so that others would choose to follow the same steps and come to the same conclusion.

At the Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies (DJLS), we read scores of papers each year from law schools across the country. They show us that, nationwide, many authors misunderstand the purpose of a research paper. It is not a memo, nor is it an op-ed. The goal is to use a …

Student Wellness And Mental Wellbeing, Emily Bishop, Stevie Leahy

William & Mary Law School’s Conference for Excellence in Online Teaching Legal Research & Writing

This presentation will focus on centering the mental wellbeing of students for the 2020-21 academic year. The incoming cohort has unique stressors that are compounded by challenging current events - as educators, we are also challenged to engage and connect with these students in a virtual environment. This presentation will give practical strategies to engage with students that facilitate and foster mental health, with an eye to anchoring our tactics within a legal research and writing curriculum. The presentation aims to encourage healthy dialogue on how to de-stigmatize mental wellbeing and best support our students. This goal, more so now …

Brief Of The Boston University Center For Antiracist Research As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner In Larry Thompson V. Police Officer Pagiel Clark, Shield #28472; Police Officer Paul Montefusco, Shield #10580; Police Officer Phillip Romano, Shield #6295; Police Officer Gerard Bouwmans, Shield #2102, Respondents, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Neda Khoshkhoo, Caitlin Glass

Faculty Scholarship

INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE

The Boston University Center for Antiracist Research (the “Center”) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit university-based research institution that convenes researchers, scholars, and policy experts across disciplines to find novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial injustice and inequity. The Center’s interest in this case arises from its expertise in researching and understanding the harms of policies, practices, and actions that produce and sustain racial inequities, and in advancing antiracist alternatives that promote racial equity.

The Second Circuit’s interpretation of the so-called “favorable termination rule,” which imposes an “indications-of-innocence” standard, is …

Table Of Contents & Masthead, Jacob Bliss

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents & Masthead, Jacob Bliss

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Matter How Loud I Shout: Legal Writing As Gender Sidelining, Leslie Culver

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I argue that viewing legal writing as a mode of gender sidelining uncovers the urgency for law schools to provide unitary tenure for legal writing programs across all law schools. I recognize that many legal writing faculty are employed under ABA Standard 405(c), a seemingly second-best option to traditional tenure tracks. As Professor Kathy Stanchi (UNLV) comments, however, while Standard 405(c) offers some respite from “job insecurity, intellectual disparagement, and pay inequity,” it ultimately serves as an “institutionalized bar to professional advancement divorced from any reasonable measure of merit.” This essay takes Stanchi’s framing of 405(c) as …

The Cultural (Re)Turn: The Case For Teaching Culturally Responsive Lawyering, Danielle L. Tully

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Against The Grain: The Secret Role Of Dissents In Integrating Rhetoric Across The Curriculum, Mark A. Hannah, Susie Salmon

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

What Probate Courts Cite: Lessons From The New York County Surrogate’S Court 2017-2018, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

By knowing what a judge cites, one may better understand what the judge believes is important, how the judge understands her work will be used, and how the judge conceives of the judicial role. Empirical scholars have devoted serious attention to the citation practices and patterns of the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Courts of Appeals, and multiple state supreme courts. Remarkably little is known about what probate courts cite. This Article makes three principal claims — one empirical, one interpretative, and one normative. This Article demonstrates through data, derived from a study of all decrees …

Cicero And Barack Obama: How To Unite The Republic Without Losing Your Head, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

By turning to the works of Cicero and Barack Obama, we can find models of how to speak into crises in ways that foster unity. Cicero’s Catilinarian orations were delivered in 63 BCE, during his one-year term as consul—the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. Facing a conspiracy by certain noble Romans, Cicero delivered a series of four speeches that drove the chief conspirator out of Rome, turned public opinion against the conspirators, and convinced the Roman Senate to support the death penalty for conspirators who remained and were captured in Rome. The Fourth Catilinarian, in which Cicero advocates …