Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 14, Issue 2, Winter 2001.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Catholic University Law Review, Ralph J. Rohner

Scholarly Articles

This is an essay, not a history, on the first fifty years of the Catholic University Law Review. When an enterprise survives that long, it is cause for acknowledgment and celebration. This seems especially appropriate for the Law Review when we consider that it is managed by amateurs, relies on volunteer labor, and changes leadership every year; yet, it has grown and matured into a respectable scholarly journal. There is reason to wonder from where the Law Review has come, what it has accomplished, and how and where it is going. There is reason, too, to reminisce over half a …

Gender And Legal Writing: Law Schools’ Dirty Little Secrets, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Jan M. Levine

Scholarly Works

While great strides have been made by legal writing professors in the past two decades, many law schools-perhaps most accurately, many law school deans-try to avoid the investments needed to provide their students with professional, high-quality instruction in legal research and legal writing. Law professors, including women law professors, have reacted to their deans' decisions to maintain the status quo largely by quiet acquiescence- although in some cases they openly support that stance. Legal writing seems to be just too hard, and too demanding in time and energy, to be taught by doctrinal law professors, most of whom are men …

I Know That I Taught Them How To Do That, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

Teachers have complained for years that students could not transfer their skills from one class to another, and employers have complained that the students could not apply the skills they learned in class to real world tasks. This article delves into the issues involved in students acquiring skills and the ability to transfer those to skills to similar tasks. The article describes the four steps involved in transfer identified by researchers: problem representation, search and retrieval, mapping, and application.

Modeling: Placing Persuasion In Context, Myra G. Orlen

Faculty Scholarship

The Author discusses the use of a contextual model to teach persuasion and its proven success in first year classes at Western New England College School of Law.

A Novelist's Perspective, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Encounters With Sources, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

A reference encounter with The Congressional Globe leads Ms. Whisner to ruminate on a librarian's relationship with sources.

Finding Out What They Want To Know, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

A skilled reference librarian knows more than simply where and how to look up information. Recognizing the importance of knowing what to look for as well, Ms. Whisner discusses the venerable reference interview and its role in this key aspect of patron services.

Twenty-Five Years Through The Virginia Law Review (With Gun And Camera), Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

It is a great honor to be asked to offer a few remarks to such an august gathering. But I must confess to having had a certain puzzlement when the invitation to speak to the Law Review banquet first came. I asked one of my colleagues, "Why would they have asked me?" "It's obvious," he replied. "Their first three choices turned them down."

With that in mind, I asked my secretary, "What do they want me to talk about?" "The Future of Legal Education," she replied (somewhat portentously). This suggestion didn't ring quite true to me. I have been to …

Irish Legal History: An Overview And Guide To The Sources, Janet Sinder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Undoing Indian Law One Case At A Time: Judicial Minimalism And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Lsat Myth, Jeffrey S. Kinsler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Predicting which students will perform well in law school may seem like an impossible task, but law schools endeavor to do so everyday, and the primary tool they use to make such predictions is the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), a standardized, 101-question multiple-choice examination. This article explores whether the LSAT warrants such prominence. Using statistical and anecdotal evidence, this article analyzes recent graduates of Marquette University Law School (MULS) to ascertain whether: (1) the LSAT is a valid predictor of three-year performance in law school; (2) the LSAT is a better predictor of law school performance than the UGPA …

Joseph Mccarthy, The Law Student, Jeffrey S. Kinsler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Much is known about Joseph McCarthy, the United States Senator. A fair amount is also known about Joseph McCarthy, the lawyer and Circuit Court Judge; particularly in his home state of Wisconsin. Not much is known, however, about Joe McCarthy, the law student. This is unfortunate because, arguably, many of the traits that catapulted McCarthy to the top and bottom of American politics were first exhibited in law school. It is a safe bet that very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the …

Selected Conceptions Of Federalism: The Selective Use Of History In The Supreme Court's States' Rights Opinions, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In the period leading to the Civil War, debate over federalism and states’ rights developed into the seeds of a war that would forever change America. Over one hundred years later, the debate over federalism continues, unanswered by the blood of more than half a million soldiers. Over the last decade, the United States Supreme Court has increased state sovereignty and state immunity to levels unseen since the pre-Civil War period. The Court’s opinions are structured in a manner that relies significantly on historical methodologies. The multiple rationales used to structure the Justices’ arguments clash, and the Justices spar with …

The New Face Of Creationism: The Establishment Clause And The Latest Efforts To Suppress Evolution In Public Schools, Deborah R. Farringer

Law Faculty Scholarship

If America wants to stay at the forefront of scientific study and remain competitive with other nations, its students must be taught scientific principles that are generally applied in the global scientific community. Thus, the implications involved in the latest battles over God and science extend beyond whether to teach controversial subjects, and could have a significant effect on the future of American schools. These problems warrant the development of a new test, or new legal analysis, that will enable the Court to deal with this latest chapter in the heated evolution and creationism debate. This Note examines the evidentiary …

Books? Why?, Penny A. Hazelton

Articles

Yes, we still need law books.

Researching International Environmental Law, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

Question: I would like to use the Internet to research issues involving international law, specifically international environmental law. How can I access relevant information quickly if I have very little information to begin with?

The Lawyering Process Program: Building Competence And Confidence, Terrill Pollman, Jennifer B. Anderson

Scholarly Works

In this article, the authors describe the Lawyering Process Program at the William S. Boyd School of Law. Like their colleagues at law schools across the country, students at the Boyd School of Law spend the early part of their law school careers learning the basics of legal research and writing. Unlike many of their fellow IL's, however, Boyd students also learn other important concepts and skills. The Lawyering Process Program at Boyd is a unique, three-semester class that includes significant instruction and experience in four areas: (1) legal writing and analysis; (2) legal research; (3) lawyering skills; and (4) …

Mary S. Lawrence: Director Of Legal Research And Writing University Of Oregon 1978 - 2000, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Women, Writing & Wages: Breaking The Last Taboo, Jan M. Levine, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Fear And Loathing Of Politics In The Legal Academy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent lament about Bush v. Gore, Bruce Ackerman feared that the patent groundlessness of the opinion would convince many of a proposition he attributed to critical legal studies: that law is simply a form of politics.

This remark reflects two tendencies prominent at the Yale Law School in recent years: first, a preoccupation with a now extinct and never very successful movement of left legal academics, and second, a tendency to conflate this movement with the legal conservatism of Jusice Scalia and his collaborators at the University of Chicago and the Rehnquist Court.

These tendencies ride high …

Legal Scholarship As A Vocation, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law professors occupy a twin role as scholars and (most of them, at any rate) as lawyers. Deborah Rhode has pointed out, in her contribution to this symposium, that the lawyer role of the professor carries with it some frequently overlooked obligations, specifically the obligation to perform pro bono service. I agree with her, and have ventured similar arguments myself. Here I will address the more purely theoretical side of the legal scholar's vocation. The text I will take for my sermon is the famous speech on the scholar's role that Max Weber delivered to a student audience eighty years …

Look Who's Extrapolating: A Reply To Hoffmann, Valerie West, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In late March, a reporter called with news of a pirated copy of Professor Joseph Hoffinann's soon-to-be-published "attack" on our study, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. Did we care to comment? Obtaining our own copy revealed that Professor Hoffmann's fusillade missed its mark (he misstates what we did) and boomeranged (his mischaracterizations of our analysis accurately describe his own). We do care to comment, and Hoffmann and the Indiana Law Journal have graciously let us do so.

Hoffmann's main claim is that we "extrapolated" the 68% rate of reversible error we reported for capital verdicts …

Incorporating Bar Pass Strategies Into Routine Teaching Practices, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Second-Class Citizens In The Pink Ghetto: Gender Bias In Legal Writing, Jo Anne Durako

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Art Of Writing Good Regulations, Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth

Federal Communications Law Journal

In this introduction to the three pieces that follow, Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth proposes his view that the regulation-drafting process relies more on art than science. The Commissioner sets out a four-category sliding scale to evaluate regulations, and lists the most frequently noted problems with FCC-promulgated rules.

Teaching First-Year Civil Procedure And Other Introductory Courses By The Problem Method, Stephen J. Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

I have been teaching the first-year course in Civil Procedure for twenty years, first for five years at Ohio Northern University, and for the last fifteen years at the University of Baltimore, where I also teach a required second-year course in Evidence. When I first started teaching Civil Procedure, I used a fairly typical case method. I was never very happy with this approach for teaching a course in which one of my major goals was getting the students to learn to read, interpret and apply the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (“Federal Rules”). Gradually, I began to develop sets …

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

A New Bluebook, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In late August 2000, the Seventeenth Edition of The Bluebook' hit the shelves of lawschool bookstores across the country. Only a few first-year students have an inkling of what this unassuming, spiral-bound paperback has in store for them. However, savvy second and third-year students know to check the Preface for changes from previous editions. The Preface to the Seventeenth Edition2 lists fifteen "noteworthy" changes from the Sixteenth Edition. Here are six that may have the most impact on practitioners.

From The Editor, Steven Lopez Editor

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Two years ago, thirty-six law students embarked on an uncertain journey to create a new law journal-a legal publication that would fuse creative form with engaging content. The result, the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law & Practice, you hold in your hands.