Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Michigan Family Law Research Resources: Review And Update, Barbara H. Garavaglia

Articles

"Family law" includes topics relating to "marriage, divorce, adoption, child custody and support, child abuse and neglect, paternity, juvenile delinquency, and other domestic relations issues,"] including cohabitation and domestic violence. Michigan family law research continues to be facilitated by a combination of print and electronic research resources. As in other areas of law, web-based access to legal research resources in the realm of family law continues to improve and expand, following the general trend in legal publishing toward electronic publication. This article is primarily a review of the web-based resources provided by the Institute of Continuing Legal Education (ICLE), although …

Staffing For Law School Computing Services, Second Edition, Ann Puckett

Scholarly Works

Report summarizing survey responses from 158 of 191 law schools, reporting on fundamental questions pertaining to computing services within the law school.

Jewish Law For The Law Librarian, David Hollander

Articles

Mr Hollander provides an introductory guide to the Jewish legal system with the intent of providing law librarians with the basic knowledge necessary to begin to help a patron conduct research in Jewish law.

Blogging And The Transformation Of Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship--that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces--the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. …

An Empirical Study Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the most significant emerging intellectual movement. Empirical legal scholarship (ELS), as the term is generally used in law schools, refers to a specific type of empirical research: a model-based approach coupled with a quantitative method. This paper ranks law schools based on their place in the ELS movement and offers an essential ranking framework that can be adopted for other intellectual movements. A revised version of the paper was posted on October 11. The updated tables reflect additional data.

Library Research Labs: A Hands-On Approach To Taking The First Step With Your Students To Reflect Good Practice In Legal Education, Samantha A. Moppett, Rick Buckingham

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In 2002, Suffolk University Law School began offering library research labs to students in the first-year Legal Practice Skills (LPS) course to give them the opportunity to tackle their first legal research exercises as part of a small group with the ready assistance of a reference librarian and an LPS professor.

This article describes the structure of the research labs and explains how they reflect the "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Legal Education" that were developed to improve student learning, enhance law school teaching, and increase faculty and student personal satisfaction.

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

Law Review Article Placement: Benefit Or Beauty Prize?, Dennis J. Callahan, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cite Checking: A Brave New World, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Boilerplate Today: The Rise Of Modularity And The Waning Of Consent, Margaret Jane Radin

Michigan Law Review

Thanks to the vision of Omri Ben-Shahar and the excellence of the scholars contributing to this symposium, students of the law of commercial exchange transactions will now understand how important and interesting, and indeed exciting, boilerplate really is. The various presentations are so rich that my assigned task of commentary cannot approach an adequate summation. Instead of attempting such a task, therefore, I will take up a slightly different one. My commentary will relate some of the ideas presented in the symposium to two themes that I think are significant for the groundwork of contract today: the growing modularity of …

Leveling The Playing Field: Helping Students Succeed By Helping Them Learn To Read As Expert Lawyers, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

The article explores a way in which law schools can level the field of student admission in order to ensure the success of students as law students and as lawyers in the United States. A study which compares the reading skills of a professor and four students who had been admitted to law school under a special admissions program is presented. It provides the techniques for students to develop their reading skills. It emphasizes on the importance of teaching legal reading.

Using Court Records For Research, Teaching, And Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Margo Schlanger, Denise Lieberman

Articles

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is, wisely, planning the future of its enormous collection of relatively recent court records. The pertinent regulation, a “records disposition schedule” first issued in 1995 by the Judicial Conference of the United States in consultation with NARA, commits the Archives to keeping, permanently, all case files dated 1969 or earlier; all case files dated 1970 or later in which a trial was held, and “any civil case file which NARA has determined in consultation with court officials to have historical value.” Other files may be destroyed 20 years after they enter the federal …

Foreword: Why Open Access To Scholarship Matters, Joe Miller

Scholarly Works

On March 10, 2006, the Lewis & Clark Law Review sponsored a day-long symposium entitled Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship. That gathering led to eight papers that are forthcoming in Volume 10, Issue No. 4, of the Lewis & Clark Law Review. In this short Foreword, I offer some thoughts about why all law professors should take an interest in the movement promoting open access to scholarship. The principal reason, based in current circumstances, is the way that using an open access platform extends one's reach. The aspirational reason is that open access platforms enable us …

Blogs And The First Amendment, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

An essay discussing the First Amendment implications of blogs.

The U.S. Supreme Court And Medical Ethics: From Contraception To Managed Health Care, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Review of The U.S. Supreme Court and Medical Ethics: From Contraception to Managed Health Care (2004) by Bryan Hilliard

Scholarship By Legal Writing Professors: New Voices In The Legal Academy, Linda H. Edwards, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

In this Article, the authors explore the questions of whether legal writing topics are subjects fit for scholarship and whether scholarship on these topics could support promotion and tenure. The authors examine the scholarship of today’s legal writing professors—what they are writing and where it is being published—and they define the term “legal writing topic,” identifying major categories of legal writing scholarship and suggesting criteria for evaluation in this emerging academic area.

The Dictionary And The Man: Garner’S Black’S Law Dictionary, Jeanne Price, Roy M. Mersky

Scholarly Works

The 7th and 8th editions of Black's Law Dictionary were the first edited by Bryan Garner.  This review of the 8th edition of Black's Law Dictionary focuses on the approach taken by Garner in thoroughly revising the dictionary and places his work in the context of the recent history of legal dictionaries and lexicography.

Using A Literary Case Study To Teach Lawyering Skills: How We Used Damages By Barry Werth In The First-Year Legal Writing Curriculum, Jeanne M. Kaiser, Myra Orlen

Faculty Scholarship

First-year law students arrive for their first day of classes with varying perceptions about the practice of law and what it means to be a lawyer. Although some students have first-hand knowledge of the profession based on their work in a law office or from family members who are attorneys, many students base their entire conception of what it means to be a lawyer on images from popular media. The Authors discuss how they used a literary account to acquaint students with an authentic picture of litigation, while still teaching the rudiments of legal research and writing. The book used …

Good Faith Performance In Employment Contracts: A "Comparative Conversation" Between The Us And England, Katherine M. Apps

ExpressO

This paper asks two questions connected by the fact that they both stem from the inherent incompleteness of employment contracts: in American law, how can the terms in employment handbooks be variable, but sometimes only within reasonable procedurally fair circumstances; and in English law, why doesn’t the implied term of mutual trust and confidence in employment contracts fall foul of the strict test for implication of terms into contract? This paper finds the answer to both questions in the doctrine of good faith. An analysis of good faith as a “comparative conversation” between academic and judicial debates in the US …

Nothing Dismal About It: Researching Environmental Law Without Getting Swamped, Jennifer Sekula

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

The Prophecies Of The Prophetic Jurist – A Review Of Selected Works Of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Kissi Agyebeng

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

This is a review of the methodology and style of legal research of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., focusing on the ideological and philosophical leanings that informed his scholarship. The review spans selected works of his undergraduate days through his mid-career writings and his representative opinions on the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Improving Legal Writing: A Life-Long Learning Process And Continuing Professional Challenge, Kathleen Elliott Vinson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article shows why lawyers must improve their writing skills beyond law school, throughout their careers, and why the legal profession must join the legal academy in working to improve them. It offers recommendations that the legal profession can implement to combine efforts with academia to meet the challenge of improving legal writing. Academia and the legal profession agree that lawyers write poorly; however, how, when, and who should improve writing skills needs examination. For pragmatic and pedagogical reasons, a united effort between academia and the legal profession is required to meet the challenge of improving legal writing. Writing is …

Readers' Expectations, Discourse Communities, And Writing Effective Bar Exam Answers, Denise D. Riebe

ExpressO

This article advocates that law schools should provide bar exam preparation for students, including instruction regarding effective writing for bar exams. Using the reader expectation approach and considering the unique conventions of the legal profession's discourse community as a theoretical backdrop, this article examines effective writing for bar exams. It also provides practical recommendations for instructing students to write effective bar exam answers.

Bluebook No. 18—“Thank God For Competition….”, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Eighteenth Edition of The Bluebook' is now available, and thanks to competition from the ALWD Citation Manual ("ALWD Manual"), this version is better than ever for practitioners. In the words of Gil Atkinson, '"thank God for competition. When our competitors upset our plans or outdo our designs, they open infinite possibilities of our own work to us."

Advancing Public Interest Practitioner Research Skills In Legal Education, Randy J. Diamond

Faculty Publications

The information revolution has dramatically altered the legal research landscape, expanding the bounds of legal authority. Practitioner research requires more than traditional legal research. It also encompasses factual investigation, non-legal information, interdisciplinary and audience research. Many new lawyers are ill-prepared to research novel and unusual situations, to cope with unwritten laws and local customs, and to meet shifting authority expectations.

Unpublished Opinions And No Citation Rules In The Trial Courts, J. Thomas Sullivan

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Art Of Indirection, Elizabeth Fajans, Mary R. Falk

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pioneering Change In The Centennial Year, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Signatures Of Ideology: The Case Of The Supreme Court's Criminal Docket, Ward Farnsworth

Michigan Law Review

Everyone suspects that Supreme Court justices' own views of policy play a part in their decisions, but the size and nature of the part is a matter of vague impression and frequent dispute. Do their preferences exert some pressure at the margin or are they better viewed as the mainsprings of decision? The latter claim, identified with legal realism, has been lent some support by political scientists who point out that some justices regularly vote for or against certain kinds of claims (for example, under the Fourth Amendment), or that votes in some areas are broadly predictable according to a …

Lawyers And Learning: A Metacognitive Approach To Legal Education, Anthony S. Niedwiecki

ExpressO

The article discusses how the current methods of teaching law students hinder their ability to transfer the knowledge and skills learned in law school to the practice of law. I propose integrating learning theory into the law school curriculum, with a specific focus on teaching metacognitive skills. Generally, metacognition refers to having both an awareness of and control over one’s learning and thinking. Professors can help the students gain an awareness of their learning by focusing the students on which learning preferences and experiences they bring to law school and how they can match them to the skills required of …