Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

A Tribute To Mary Lawrence, Ruth C. Vance

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Statutory Interpretation In The Age Of Grammatical Permissiveness: An Object Lesson For Teaching Why Grammar Matters, Susan J. Hankin

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses an unpublished case interpreting New York’s animal cruelty law as an object lesson to teach why grammar matters. In People v. Walsh, 2008 WL 724724 (N.Y. Crim. Ct. Jan. 3, 2008), the court’s interpretation of the statute turned, in part, on the serial comma rule (sometimes called the “Oxford comma” rule). The court followed a mandatory approach to interpret the statute’s meaning, even though most contemporary grammar and style books make such use of a comma optional. One of the many benefits of using a case example to teach why grammar matters is that it focuses students …

Boulder Statement On Legal Research Education: Signature Pedagogy Statement, Legal Information Conference Attendees

2010 Conference (Boulder)

No abstract provided.

Don't Reinvent The Wheel: Legal Research Guides And Bibliographies Will Save You Valuable Time And Effort, Matt Novak

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

When researching unfamiliar areas of law it is often helpful to consult research guides and bibliographies. These resources can expedite the research process by identifying, compiling, and explaining the various tools needed to successfully research a legal topic. Research guides and bibliographies can be found in a number of online and print sources. By using a variety of specialized tools, one can quickly locate quality legal research guides and bibliographies no matter where they are.

Before They Even Start: Hope And Incoming 1ls, Barbara J. Brunner

Duquesne Law Review

No abstract provided.

Would You Say That To Your Children? Enhancing Learning Through Improved Communication, Karin Mika

Duquesne Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Twenty-Ninth Annual John Marshall International Moot Court Competition In Information Technology And Privacy Law: Bench Memorandum, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 81 (2010), Erin Murphy-Hillstrom, Whitney Hutchinson, Efthymios Katsarelis, Amber Lynn Wagner, Panagiota Kelali

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Petitioner, Aaron Murphy, appeals to the Marshall Supreme Court from a decision affirming the grant of summary judgment in favor of Respondent, MarshCODE, on his claims of defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and breach of contract. Thus, there are now three issues before the Marshall Supreme Court. The first two issues concern whether an individual can maintain an action of defamation and false light invasion of privacy when the false statement arose because of a computer malfunction. The last issue concerns whether the unilateral modification of a privacy agreement constitutes a breach of contract when assent to the modification …

The Twenty-Ninth Annual John Marshall International Moot Court Competition In Information Technology And Privacy Law: Brief For Petitioner, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 119 (2010), Kelly Foss, Vince Lombardozzi, Jared Palmer

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

The circuit court erred when it granted summary judgment in favor of MarshCODE because Mr. Murphy has demonstrated facts to support the elements of the (1) defamation, (2) false light invasion of privacy, and (3) breach of contract claims. First, Mr. Murphy has provided facts to support the defamation claim. MarshCODE made a false and defamatory statement about Mr. Murphy when it told Ms. Who that he was her father. Because this matter concerns Mr. Murphy's private life, a negligence standard applies rather than the First Amendment's actual malice standard. Mr. Murphy has demonstrated that MarshCODE acted either negligently or …

The Twenty-Ninth Annual John Marshall International Moot Court Competition In Information Technology And Privacy Law: Brief For Respondent, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 151 (2010), Kimberly Hodgman, Jody Rodenberg, Erin Tyler

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

The First District Court of Appeals properly affirmed summary judgment on behalf of MarshCODE because Appellant failed to raise a genuine issue of material fact on his defamation claim. First, MarshCODE's accidental disclosure of information, which implied that Appellant participated in premarital sex or had a homosexual child, was not defamatory because an average person would not lower his estimation or be deterred from associating with Appellant based on such a statement. Second, no publication was made because MarshCODE did not act with negligence and was unaware of the program malfunction that resulted in the release of the information. Third, …

Safeguarding "The Precious": Counsel On Law Journal Publication Agreements In Digital Times, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 217 (2010), Michael N. Widener

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Heaping scholarship fills the academic print and online press about where legal scholars should publish and how to have one’s paper accepted for publication. But there is scarce writing about the contractual relationship between the law journal and the author of an accepted paper. This may be due in part to broadly misconstrued or ignored publication agrees, or perhaps that the business relationship is unworthy of scholarly attention. Regardless, this paper introduces a pragmatist’s perspective on evaluating and revising publication agreements, and informs student editors how publication agreements accomplish a journal’s objectives, based on current copyright law. Finally, this paper …

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes the Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 22, Issue 3, Spring 2010.

Making Effective Use Of Practitioners' Briefs In The Law School Curriculum, Anna P. Hemingway

St. Thomas Law Review

This article argues that practitioners' briefs do have a place in the law school classroom. Part II of this article discusses the pedagogy behind using practitioners' briefs in the legal writing classroom. It demonstrates how using practitioners' briefs enriches lesson plans, heightens interest in the classroom, and helps students gain a richer appreciation for lawyers' goals when they write as advocates. Part III presents some different ways of using practitioners' briefs to teach persuasive writing. It examines how the author has used practitioners' briefs to teach persuasive writing of the statement of facts, point headings and summary of the argument. …

On-Line Legal Research Workshops, Frederick B. Jonassen

St. Thomas Law Review

Like riding a bicycle, playing tennis, or driving a car, legal research is a skill, and like any other skill, it is learned by doing, and not by listening to a lecture. However, lectures are indispensable for introducing the skill. The mental processes applied in electronic legal research may differ from those applied to book legal research. But because both electronic and book research are skills, a guided workshop in electronic legal research may be based on similar principles to those underlying a workshop in book legal research, with appropriate modifications. The aspects of the electronic legal workshop proposed here …

Legal Research In The Digital Age: Authentication And Preservation Of Primary Material, Matt Novak

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

Most legal professionals have used free online resources to help in the legal research process. Whether it is an opinion downloaded from a court's Web site, a federal statute located using Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII), an article on Wikipedia, or a post on someone's blawg, the quantity and variety of free online resources seems to grow on a daily basis. Some have even wondered if these resources can one day replace the need to subscribe to a computer-assisted legal research (CALR) service such as Westlaw or LexisNexis. Late last year, the "blogosphere" was abuzz with this question after Google …

Lawyering Outside Lawsuits: Incorporating Negotiations, Settlements, And Mediations Into The Legal Writing Curriculum, Olivia Farrar, A.G. Harmon

Scholarly Articles

Legal education is built around a core irony: almost no human disputes are resolved via trials, and yet we dedicate years to teaching law students how to resolve disputes via litigation. To remedy this incongruity between legal education and the reality of lawyering, the two of us have begun integrating negotiations, settlements, and mediation into our 1L legal writing curriculum. This article describes why and how we have introduced our students to these non-litigation skill sets, starting to train them in what we believe may be their most powerful dispute resolution skills when they enter the legal world.

Writer's Block: Why Punctuation Matters, Part Two, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Writer's Block: The "Ins And Outs" Of Good Legal Writing, Part One, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Grooming Good Legal Writers Through Tailored, Constructive Feedback, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Lexicon Of Human Rights, Duncan E. Alford

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Leveraging A Library Collection Through Collaborative Digitization Ventures, Femi Cadmus, Fred Shapiro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is Our Students Learning - Using Assessments To Measure And Improve Law School Learning And Performance, 15 Barry L. Rev. 73 (2010), Rogelio A. Lasso

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Ontologies: The Effect Of Copyright Protection On Public Scientific Data Sharing Using Semantic Web Ontologies, 10 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 181 (2010), Andrew Clearwater

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

The semantic web is going to become an important tool for scientists who need to accurately share data given context through structured relationships. The structure that defines contextual relationships on the semantic web is known as an ontology; which is a hierarchical organization of a knowledge domain that contains entities and their relations. This paper seeks to answer whether semantic web ontologies are protectable by copyright, and regardless of the outcome, what the best practices are for the scientific community. The best practices for the scientific community should include the adoption of a machine readable ontology license which disclaims copyright …

Misplaced Modifiers - Say What, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Speech, Truth, And Freedom: An Examination Of John Stuart Mill's And Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes's Free Speech Defenses, Irene M. Ten Cate

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Another Early Pennsylvania Legal Periodical: Journal Of Jurisprudence (1821), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

In 1821, John Hall published the Journal of Jurisprudence, "a new series of The American Law Journal." It is sometimes cited under the former title or as volume seven of the American Law Journal^l that was the first law periodical published in the United States. The new volume had 542 pages, divided into three issues of 136, 136, and 270 pages. Mathew Carey & Son, one of the leading Philadelphia printers of early, nineteenth-century Philadelphia,² was the printer of the Journal. In antebellum Pennsylvania, Philadelphia served as a major printing center,³ hosting a number of …

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes the Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 22, Issue 2, Winter 2010.

Researching Georgia Legislative History, Carol Watson

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Attorneys often seek Georgia legislative history when trying to clarify a vague statute, determine the intent of the legislature or trace a law’s amendments over time. Although sometimes difficult to compile, Georgia legislative history tidbits can be gathered by consulting a variety of resources.

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Faculty Scholarship

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Before They Even Start: Hope And Incoming 1ls, Barbara Brunner

Faculty Scholarship

Newly-accepted law school 1Ls often express interest in how they should spend the summer before starting their fall courses in order to be best prepared for success in their first semester. This desire to have a "leg up" on law school success leads those of us teaching first-year courses to think more deeply about what constitutes a "good preparation" for the unique experiences that new law students will face, and what skills are really necessary to increase their possibilities of success, especially in the first semester.

Over the past few years, I have compiled a list of activities which I …

Arkansas, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

An update to the 2007 State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources.