Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Academic Law Librarians Are Paid 47% Less Than Their Faculty Counterparts, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

In December Joe Fore, the co-director of the Legal Writing program at the University of Virginia School of Law, posted to Twitter a thread comparing tenure track and legal writing salaries. In comparing four public schools, he discovered that the average starting salary for a tenure track professor was $173,000 while the average salary for all legal writing faculty was $111,000. A few academic law librarians saw the tweet and replied that someone should do the same for law librarians, too.

Introducing The Dispute Financing Library – A Free Online Resource, Ingrid Mattson

Library Staff Online Writings

NYU Law School’s Center on Civil Justice has developed an online collection of documents and media related to third-party litigation funding called the Dispute Financing Library. The Center’s goal is to create a collection of material on the topic and includes statutes, case law, journal articles, bar reports, news, best practices, and more.

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 (Feb. 2022), The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

W&L Law Library Newsletter

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Volume 1, Issue 1 (February 2022).

Information For Submitting To Online Law Review Companions, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The following materials, modeled after the chart prepared by Professor Allen Rostron and Professor Nancy Levit at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law, contain information about online companions of main law reviews and journals at the top 20 schools (as determined by the most recent US News overall ranking, not because that system merits endorsement, but because it is convenient). Specifically, the chart derives from the journals’ websites the following information:

• Name of the online journal
• Word count limitation, if any
• Subject matter limitations, if any
• Preferred essay/commentary/review submission method
• Whether articles from online journal are included …

Where’S The Beef, Turkey, Butter, Cheese, Or Other Animal Ingredient?, Virginia C. Thomas

Library Scholarly Publications

The author discusses current challenges presented by federal and state labeling laws and standards pertaining to plant-based meat alternative food products.

Law Library Blog (February 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Hierarchy, Race & Gender In Legal Scholarly Networks, Keerthana Nunna, W. Nicholson Price Ii, Jonathan Tietz

Law & Economics Working Papers

A potent myth of legal academic scholarship is that it is mostly meritocratic and that it is mostly solitary. Reality is more complicated. In this Article, we plumb the networks of knowledge co-production in legal academia by analyzing the star footnotes that appear at the beginning of most law review articles. Acknowledgements paint a rich picture of both the currency of scholarly credit and the relationships among scholars. Building on others’ prior work characterizing the potent impact of hierarchy, race, and gender in legal academia more generally, we examine the patterns of scholarly networks and probe the effects of those …

Lawyers, Mistakes, And Moral Growth, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Vincent R. Johnson, professor at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, reviews The Man in the Ditch: A Redemption Story for Today by Dallas attorney Mike H. Bassett.

Locating The Law : A Handbook For Non-Law Librarians, Elizabeth Caulfield, Southern California Association Of Law Libraries. Committee On Public Access To Legal Information.

AALL Legal Website of the Month

The Committee of the Southern California Association of Law Libraries (SCALL) made accessible a revised version of their comprehensive legal reference resource Locating the Law: A Handbook for Non-Law Librarians, 6th ed. The handbook provides ready access to a reliable legal research reference resource to assist you in reading legal citations and how to conduct legal research.

Applying Motivation Theory To Improve 1ls' Motivation, Self-Efficacy, And Skill Mastery, Nathan A. Preuss

Scholarly Works

This article discusses how understanding two motivation and learning theories- expectancy-value and attribution-can help instructors to improve first-year law students' motivation, self-efficacy, and mastery of the knowledge and skills needed for success in law school as well as in their future careers

An Underestimated Showcase Of Student Scholarship: Law School Institutional Repositories, Dajiang Nie

Duquesne Law Review

Law schools have been using institutional repositories as a showcase for law journals and faculty scholarly achievements for a long time, but law school institutional repositories fail to collect student scholarship regularly. Aspects of law school institutional repositories make no sense when directly benefiting both students and law schools and failing to display student scholarship. This Article examines student scholarship in law school institutional repositories, analyzing its current status, advantages, and keys to success. The Article shows that law school institutional repositories underappreciate student scholarship, and the content of student repositories also lacks diversity. This approach impairs the positive impacts …

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead and advisors for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 34, Issue 2, Spring 2022.

Liberty And Justice For All?: A Pathfinder On The Use Of Lyrics As Evidence In Civil And Criminal Trial, Stephanie Washington

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

The Tangled Web: Teaching The Meaning Of Legal Citations In The Online Age, Matthew L. Timko, Heather J.E. Simmons

College of Law Faculty Publications

Online citations are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, a citation embedded in a digital document can usually be retrieved by clicking on a link, but on the other, this process eliminates the need to understand any of the information inherent in the citation. To a law student who has only conducted research online, a legal citation is like a wireless passkey—a random string of characters that has no meaning. It is therefore unsurprising that law students have trouble distinguishing between a statute and a regulation. Citations underpin the entire legal research process, tying everything together …

What Inclusive Instructors Do Book Review, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Inclusive teaching is not just an aspirational goal. It is our ethical obligation to students. Our students can spend years dreaming of attending law school and working to achieve that goal. They can spend decades paying off the costs of attendance. Law faculty owe every student of all backgrounds, races, religions, genders, learning abilities, ages, socioeconomic statuses, immigration statuses, and military statuses an environment in which they feel like they belong and can thrive. WHAT INCLUSIVE INSTRUCTORS Do powerfully reminds us that inclusive teaching is not identified by obscenity law's "I know it when I see it" murkiness. Rather, it …

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Improved Citators Through Improved Citations, Andrew J. Martineau

Articles

This article shows the continued need for the adoption of a universal, medium- and vendor-neutral citation format by examining how negative case treatment can be discerned algorithmically from Bluebook signals. Although traditional citations to case reporters are treated as machine-readable identifiers by contemporary research databases, the shortcomings of this format result in unnecessary errors and lag time in citators that discern negative treatment information from Bluebook-formatted citations alone. By adopting a universal citation format, as well as a small set of citation "best practices, " we would see significant improvements in these kinds of purely algorithmic citators. The greater the …

Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea For Adopting Doi, Valeri Craigle, Aaron Retteen, Benjamin Keele

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

As librarians, we do a fair amount of research online for ourselves and the faculty and students we serve. As researchers, we know that there is nothing more frustrating than encountering a dead link to a much-needed article, particularly when there are deadlines to meet. Dead links (link/ reference rot) can be a particularly frequent occurrence for law review articles because the law review societies that publish them have not yet adopted standards for preserving online access to them, particularly the adoption of a standard for implementing persistent URLs.

This Practical Insight is a plea to law reviews and law …

Passion Projects In Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute To Igor Kavass And His Personal Mission To Acquire And Organize U.S. International Agreements, Loren Turner

Articles

In December 2020, Oona Hathaway, Curtis Bradley, and Jack Goldsmith, law professors at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard, respectively, published their article, The Failed Transparency Regime for Executive Agreements: An Empirical and Normative Analysis, in the Harvard Law Review. The article reveals that the U.S. executive branch consistently fails to comply with federal requirements to report and publish the international agreements it makes with foreign countries. As a result, Congress and the American public regularly lack access to legal information to which they are entitled under federal law. Additionally, Hathaway, Bradley, and Goldsmith identify a particular time when our already-inadequate access …

Race And Lawyering In The Legal Writing Classroom, Danielle L. Tully

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Let's All Be..Georgia? Expanding Access To Justice For Incarcerated Litigants By Rewriting The Rules For Writing The Law, Ashley Krenelka Chase

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Humanizing Transactional Documents: Why And How Transactional Drafters Should Use Narrative Techniques, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

The core of many transactional documents will be the acquisition, creation, or exchange of property or services. Yet, transactional documents are not only descriptive legal devices that dictate the exchange of widgets for cash. They are multifaceted documents that have the ability to do more than memorialize a transaction and create the private laws between the parties. As narrative texts, transactional documents tell the stories of the parties' relationship, whether it be an employment agreement, trust document, or purchase and sale agreement. Transactional documents present necessary and relevant information as a series of linked events where the transacting parties become …

Charles Dickens' Novels In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article examines written judicial opinions that contain references to novels by Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the British novelist and social critic who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Age. Americans today still read Dickens’ best-known novels, and the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal and state courts have cited and quoted from them.

Who Are You Protecting?: A Feminist Analysis Of Gay And Trans Panic Defense Bans, How They Are Defined, And Who They Protect, Tyler S. Sesker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As of April 2022, sixteen U.S. states ban Gay panic and Trans panic criminal defenses. These state-law prohibitions stemmed from several high-profile murder trials, focusing on the identity of the decedent, including the killings of Matthew Shepard and Latisha King. Between 1970 and 2020, criminal defenses interrogating the gender identity or sexual identity of victims of violence were used at least 104 times, with nearly a third of those cases resulting in reduced criminal charges and penalties. Today, in thirty-four states, the same tactics remain legal. Applying a feminist and outsider legal lens, this study engages in a textual analysis …

Reimagining Langdell's Legacy: Puncturing The Equilibrium In Law School Pedagogy, Danielle L. Tully, Rachel Gurvich, Laura Webb, Alexa Chew, Jane Cross, Joy Kanwar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Turducken™ Legal Writing: Deconstructing The Multi-State Performance Test Genre, Kaci Bishop, Alexa Chew

Faculty Publications

The Multistate Performance Test (MPT) has been praised as the most redeeming part of the otherwise unredeemable bar exam because it most aligns with what new attorneys do in practice. It has also been praised, along with other performance tests, as a useful teaching tool throughout the law school curriculum. This article builds on prior scholarship about the MPT by analyzing the MPT as a tool for teaching and testing legal writing and professional communication skills.

The new insight that this article brings is that the testing aspect of the MPT tends to engulf the teaching aspect; understanding both of …

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Title Page, Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 35, Issue 1, Fall 2022.

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Great legal writing is about more than mechanics. But careful attention to legal writing mechanics is nevertheless critical for effective, clear, and persuasive writing. Proper grammar, usage, and correct punctuation makes analysis clearer and therefore more effective. It also shows the reader that the writer has paid close attention to detail, which makes the reader more likely to find the writer credible. Relatedly, communicating in plain language is critical to making sure that “readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” And proper citation—or even better, stylish citation—helps the reader easily understand what …

Making Space For Online Research Experiments In Law School Courses, Hilary Evans Cameron, Sean Rehaag

Articles & Book Chapters

This reflective article explores opportunities for integrating online research experiments into large law school courses. It does so by drawing on the experience of the authors with an online research experiment involving simulated refugee adjudication undertaken with the full cohort of 1L students in a Canadian faculty of law. The article describes the context for the research, sets out the lessons that the authors learned about conducting experimental research, and describes the positive feedback provided by student participants. The article concludes with a recommendation by the authors that other legal scholars consider integrating research experiments into law school courses, both …

Toward A Fair And Sustainable Corporate Governance System: Reflections On Leo Strine, Jr.'S Writing On Institutional Investors, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to contribute to this Festschrift for my friend, mentor, and co-author, Leo Strine, Jr. It is also a pleasure to revisit his vast body of work and to re-experience the breadth and depth of his scholarship, as well as reflect on his unparalleled influence on the development of corporate law that he brought about while presiding over its most influential courts for twenty-one years.

In thinking about this essay, I recalled a conversation that I had with “CJS” when I was serving as his law clerk. In this conversation, he decried (with James Taylor blasting in …