Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Most Revealing Word In The United States Reports, Richard Primus

Articles

The most prominent issue in NFIB v. Sebelius was whether Congress’s regulatory power under the Commerce Clause stops at a point marked by a distinction between “activity” and “inactivity.” According to the law’s challengers, prior decisions about the scope of the commerce power already reflected the importance of the distinction between action and inaction. In all of the previous cases in which exercises of the commerce power had been sustained, the challengers argued, that power had been used to regulate activity. Never had Congress tried to regulate mere inactivity. In NFIB, four Justices rejected that contention, writing that such …

Words, Wolves, And Show Dogs, Zachary Schmook

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Architecture Of Drama: How Lawyers Can Use Screenwriting Techniques To Tell More Compelling Stories, Teresa M. Bruce

Publications

Hollywood writers have a secret. They know how to tell a compelling story—so compelling that the top-grossing motion pictures rake in millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars. How do they do it? They use a simple formula involving three acts that propel the story forward, three "plot points" that focus on the protagonist, and two "pinch points" that focus on the adversary. The attached Article argues that lawyers should build their stories in the same way Hollywood writers do. It deconstructs the storytelling formula used in movies and translates it into an IRAC-like acronym, SCOR. Attorneys who use SCOR will …

A Reconsideration Of Copyright's Term, Kristelia A. García, Justin Mccrary

Publications

For well over a century, legislators, courts, lawyers, and scholars have spent significant time and energy debating the optimal duration of copyright protection. While there is general consensus that copyright’s term is of legal and economic significance, arguments both for and against a lengthy term are often impressionistic. Utilizing music industry sales data not previously available for academic analysis, this Article fills an important evidentiary gap in the literature. Using recorded music as a case study, we determine that most copyrighted music earns the majority of its lifetime revenue in the first five to ten years following its initial release …

We Carry Each Other, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Bringing The Court Into The Classroom: Suggestions For How To Craft Exercises For Upper-Level Courses Using Real Practitioners' Briefs, Benjamin Halasz

Articles

When I came to teach after practicing for over a decade, I wanted my students to learn to write by using materials from real clients and cases. I quickly found that’s easier said than done. But through experimentation and discussions with experienced colleagues, I found several successful ways to put students into the role of writing parts of a “real” brief—one that uses a real case and real facts—for short, in-class exercises in upper-level courses.

Several articles tout the benefits of using briefs as examples, an enthusiasm I join. But this article focuses on using cases, and especially briefs, as …

Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell

Reviews

No abstract provided.

Justice Kennedy's Prose – Style And Substance, Eric Segall, Eric Berger, Michael C. Dorf, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement in June 2018 sent shockwaves throughout America. After Justice Sandra Day O'Connor left the Court in 2005, Justice Kennedy became the Court's all-important swing vote in virtually every important area of constitutional law. His views on affirmative action, abortion, campaign finance reform, free speech, and the separation of church and state (among many other constitutional issues) were the ones that mattered the most among the Justices. Lawyers prepared arguments and filed briefs in the Supreme Court for the main purpose of persuading Justice Kennedy to rule for their clients. He was, quite simply, the …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Four Recommendations, Jed S. Rakoff, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

In an age of mass incarceration, it is not so easy to find good in the U.S. criminal justice system. But The Secret Barrister makes you appreciate the better aspects of our system by showing just how dysfunctional the corresponding English system has become. The book — written by an anonymous junior barrister — is a devastating, sometimes hilarious, and frequently heart-breaking account of how the criminal justice system in England and Wales is not only broke financially but broken in its ability to deliver justice, whether to prosecutors, defendants, victims, or the public.

Strengthening The International Clinical Scholarly Community: Opportunities For The Clinical Law Review And Beyond, Leah Wortham

Scholarly Articles

In its first 25 years, the Clinical Law Review (CLR) provided a ground-breaking foundation to build a scholarly field inspired and informed by clinical work and to legitimate that scholarship within the academy. The CLR broadened the window for clinicians to put their work in a wider context of other clinicians' experience, and with that context and comparison, to build theory from this common body of endeavor.

As Part I describes, 12 of the CLR's 404 works in its 25-year history include voices from outside the United States. While some countries' clinical education history is as old, or older, than …

Justice Kennedy And The First Amendment, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews some of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most significant contributions to First Amendment jurisprudence. These include his calls for absolute protection for pure political speech, his strong protection for commercial speech, his distaste for campaign finance reform laws that censored speech, his general concern for the silencing of sexual expression, his coercion test in Establishment Clause cases, and his significant failure in the public-employee free-speech decision Garcetti v. Ceballos.

The Content-Discrimination Principle And The Impact Of Reed V. Town Of Gilbert, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

The content-discrimination principle remains the chief analytical tool used in First Amendment jurisprudence. Under this doctrine, laws are categorized as content-based or content-neutral. Content-based laws are subject to strict scrutiny and content-neutral ones are subject to intermediate scrutiny.

The U.S. Supreme Court ratcheted up the content-discrimination principle in Reed v. Town of Gilbert. Previously, lower courts were divided on whether a law was content-based if the underlying purpose was not to engage in censorship or content-discrimination. In Reed, however, the Court declared that the law’s purpose is not the central inquiry. It concluded that if a law draws facial distinctions …

Masthead

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fake News, Alternative Facts, And Disinformation: The Importance Of Teaching Media Literacy To Law Students, Marin Dell

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Five Recommendations, Femi Cadmus, Casandra Laskowski

Faculty Scholarship

A brief review of five recommended exemplary legal books published in 2018.

Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Inspired by “‘A Day in My Law Library Life,’ Circa 1997,” this compilation collects descriptions of a day in the lives of law librarians in 2018. The descriptions provide a current snapshot and historical record of the law library profession, with similarities to, and differences from, the profession of 1997.

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

Women In The Legal Academy: A Brief History Of Feminist Legal Theory, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Women’s entry into the legal academy in significant numbers—first as students, then as faculty—was a 1970s and 1980s phenomenon. During those decades, women in law schools struggled: first, for admission and inclusion as individual students on a formally equal footing with male students; then for parity in their numbers in classes and on faculties; and, eventually, for some measure of substantive equality across various parameters, including their performance and evaluation both in and in front of the classroom, as well as in the quality of their experiences as students and faculty members and in the benefits to be reaped from …

Tracking Colorado Legislation, Robert Linz

Other Faculty Publications

When the 72nd General Assembly commences in January 2019, many researchers will want to follow the developing legislation. In the Second Regular session of the 71st General Assembly, the House considered 441 bills and the Senate considered 280 bills on a wide range of subjects, both controversial and mundane.1 Researchers need a way to sift through this large amount of legislation so they can track legislation pertinent to them through the legislative process. h e General Assembly’s website offers one approach. So too do commercial services, which of er not only access to the status of legislation and documents created …

Navigating Scholarship Discovery, Research Impact, And Open Access, Carol A. Watson, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Gregg Gordon

Presentations

The leadership teams of bepress and SSRN will present the findings of an integration pilot conducted in partnership with Columbia Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, the University of Georgia School of Law’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library, and Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. Expanding the reach of open access scholarship is central to the mission of both bepress and SSRN. However for many institutions, the separation of the two platforms had created barriers to faculty engagement and the building of successful open access initiatives. With both companies now part of the Elsevier portfolio, it seemed the …

One Judge's "Ten Tips For Effective Brief Writing" (Part Ii), Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Chief United States Bankruptcy Judge Terrence L. Michael (N.D.OKLA.) has written "Ten Tips for Effective Brief Writing" and posted them on the court's website. In the Journal's September-October issue, part 1 of this article began by discussing Tip #9 ("leave the venom at home"). That part proceeded to discuss Tips 1-4.

This final part discusses the remaining Tips. All 10 thoughtful Tips warrant careful consideration from advocates who prepare submissions for trial courts or appellate courts.

Getting Visual, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (November 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Keeping Up With New Legal Titles: The Legal Research Manual With Video Modules, 2nd Ed., Christine Iaconeta Dulac

Faculty Publications

The Legal Research Survival Manual with Video Modules, by Robert Berring and Michael Levy, is an eighty-seven-page book written in a conversational, informal tone, packed with all the information new legal researchers need to survive their early days in the law library. The book's intended audience are novice legal researchers, in particular first-year law students. The authors have filled the pages with sage advice but left out material novices are not likely to encounter during the first year of law school. The authors, with the help of two additional experts, have added twelve online videos readers can access for expanded …

Playing To Their Passion: A Legal Research Course That Resonates With Law Students, Susan Drisko Zago

Law Faculty Scholarship

The first year of law school is chock-full of new experiences. Students can become overwhelmed in the face of so much change that they forget why they chose law school as a career path. They often lose sight of their end goal and need a touchstone to ground them back to their initial interests. Legal Research is the ideal first-year class to connect the acquisition of legal skills with interesting topics in a way that encourages students’ engagement in their present and future learning. By adding a student-selected subject context to their class, Legal Research instructors can incorporate contextualized learning …

Planning For A Post Neoliberal Future, Sonia Lawrence

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Law 'Reviews'? The Changing Roles Of Law Schools And The Publications They Sponsor, Leslie Francis

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The current structure of law reviews is deeply problematic. It does not serve students, law faculty, or legal scholarship very well. There is much to learn from the early development and changes in law reviews over the years to inform law schools as they reevaluate the role of their journals in the education they provide their students and in the lives of their faculty.