Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

A Reflective Rhetorical Model: The Legal Writing Teacher As Reader And Writer, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Like most writing teachers, the legal writing teacher believes that his reading and response to student work is the most important thing he does, an importance that is underscored by the amount of time it takes. Yet, despite its importance and the hours it consumes, the rhetoric of teacher reading and writing remains relatively unexplored. This article proposes that we begin to apply what we have learned about student reading and writing to our own reading and writing. Our process of reading and responding to student work should be as reflective and rhetorical as the reading and writing process that …

Remarks, Golden Pen Award, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley, then President of the Legal Writing Institute, joins her colleagues in presenting the inaugural Golden Pen Award to Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the United States Securities Exchange Commission, for his leadership in requiring plain language in financial disclosure documents, in this transcript of the presentation of the award at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Bye-Bye Bluebook?, Pamela Lysaght, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

In March 2000, Aspen Law & Business published a new citation manual, the ALWD Citation Manual-A Professional System of Citation.' Developed mostly as a "restatement of citation," the ALWD Citation Manual not only provides the legal academy with a text that simplifies teaching legal citation, but also provides judges and lawyers with a helpful desktop reference book. This article explains why a new citation manual was created and highlights some of its significant features?

Phoebe's Lament (Symposium: Empirical Research In Commercial Transactions), James J. White

Articles

Assume a bright hypothetical social scientist - call her Phoebe - who is completely ignorant of legal research as it is practiced in today's law schools. Phoebe might speculate about legal research as follows. First, she would note that the law schools are joined with and are the exclusive source of the practitioners of a profession. Second, she would note that commercial and legal actors rub up against and are influenced by the law in countless ways every day. Third, she might remark that this interaction occurs practically on the doorsteps of our law schools. Unlike anthropologists, who may have …

The Future Of Civil Justice Reform And Empirical Legal Scholarship: A Reply, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Colorado Association Of Law Libraries, Georgia Briscoe

Publications

No abstract provided.

Linking Globally, Coping Locally: Cataloging Internet Resources At The University Of Colorado Law Library, Karen Selden

Publications

Web-based online public access catalogs (OPACs) enable catalogers to provide hotlinks to Internet-based resources of interest to their patrons. However, this capability is not without its challenges. Ms. Selden explores the local policy considerations associated with cataloging Internet resources and describes the policy-making process and some Internet cataloging policies used at the University of Colorado Law Library.

Substantive Editing Versus Technical Editing: How Law Review Editors Do Their Job, Anne Enquist

Faculty Articles

Law review editors often have a hard time adjusting to their new role of evaluating and critiquing the work of professors and established legal scholars, resulting in entire editorial boards missing fundamental problems in a particular article. The author provides a solution to this problem by recommending the adoption of two separate phases of editing - a substantive editing phase, which addresses what the article actually communicates, and a technical editing phase, which addresses the form the author uses to communicate. As examples for any law review to follow, the author provides two substantive edits of two different author submissions …

Avoiding Common Problems In Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory And Experience, Edward R. Becker, Rachel Croskery-Roberts

Articles

A majority of American law schools rely on teaching assistants to help administer first-year legal writing, research, and analysis (LWRA) courses. Specifically, surveys jointly conducted by the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) consistently detail the extensive use many LWRA professors make of teaching assistants. Likewise, Julie Cheslik recognized in her article about her 1994 survey on the use of TAs in the typical LWRA course that "[o]ne of the most prevalent uses of peer teachers in the law school setting is the employment of upper-level law students as teaching assistants in the first-year …

Censorship Of Student Internet Speech: The Effect Of Diminishing Student Rights, Fear Of The Internet And Columbine, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

Analysis and examination of the case law of student Internet website speech created off campus.

Why Lesbians And Gay Men Should Read Martha Fineman, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Amicus Curiae Briefs On The Supreme Court, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The last century has seen little change in the conduct of litigation before the United States Supreme Court. The Court's familiar procedures – the October Term, the opening-answering-reply brief format for the parties, oral argument before a nine-member Court – remain essentially as before. The few changes that have occurred, such as shortening the time for oral argument, have not been dramatic.

The Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of amicus curiae activity in the Supreme Court over the last fifty years, tracking the increase in amicus filings and in the Court's citation and quotation of …

From The Archives (Such As They Are), Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

Somewhere, in the mythic past of Langdell and Stone, a few good men decided to create a journal with unpaid student laborers in order to free their time and allow professors to concentrate on outside consulting without having to support their arguments or check their cites. This tradition continues to this day.
—Columbia Law Review Banquet Issue, 1991

I'm quite fond of that account of the origins of law reviews, but, alas, the truth is less colorful. Harvard, as we know, was first-in, truly, the Langdellian past – and there, as everywhere to follow, the Review was the result of …

The Nature And Function Of Criminal Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The practice of teaching and writing in the field of criminal law has changed dramatically in the last half-century. In the United States and England, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries, we have witnessed a turn toward theoretical inquires of a greater depth and variety than had existed previously in the history of Anglo-American law. The subjects of this new literature include the nature and rationale of punishment; the theory of justification and of excuse, that is, of wrongdoing and responsibility; the relevance of consequences to the gravity of offenses (the problem of moral luck); and the …

Critical Approaches To Property Institutions, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming And Writing: A New Era Of Communication-Part Ii, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Neuro-linguistic programming describes a method of understanding how people subjectively process information through different preferred modes or representational systems.' Generally, neuro-linguistic programming classifies perceptions into three broad categories: (1) visual, (2) auditory, and (3) kinesthetic. The September Scrivener column addressed two precepts of neuro-linguistic programming in the context of legal writing. This article addresses two more.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Florida Professional Responsibility In 1999: The Rules Of The Game, Timothy P. Chinaris, Elizabeth Clark Tarbert

Law Faculty Scholarship

The year 1999 saw a number of changes and developments in Florida professional responsibility law. This article surveys these developments by reviewing: 1) relevant reported cases; 2) ethics opinions; 3) rules changes; and 4) disciplinary actions affecting lawyers and the practice of law in the Sunshine State. These authorities are examined in the context of the various relationships upon which a lawyer's professional life is built and within which the lawyer typically operates.

Beyond The Rhetoric Of “Dirty Laundry”: Examining The Value Of Internal Criticism Within Progressive Social Movements And Oppressed Communities, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Several historical reasons explain opposition to the airing of internal criticism by scholars and activists within progressive social movements and by members of subordinate communities. Opponents often contend that such criticism might reinforce negative stereotypes of subordinate individuals and that reactionary movements and activists might appropriate and misuse negative portrayals of the oppressed. A related fear holds that internal criticism will dismantle political unity within oppressed communities and progressive social movements, thereby forestalling social change. While these concerns provide some context for understanding the resistance to internal criticism within progressive social movements, I argue in this essay that they do …

Legal Education, Professionalism, And The Public Interest, Alfred C. Aman Jr.

Alfred Aman Jr. (1991-2002)

No abstract provided.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming And Writing: A New Era Of Communication-Part I, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

New methods of transmitting information now provide faster and more effective results. Similarly, neurolinguistic programming, a new approach from communication science, provides techniques for faster and more effective communication in your writing.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Book Review - Florida Legal Research: Sources, Process, And Analysis, A. Darby Dickerson

Florida State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mooring Modifiers, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Readers can be lost at sea if your writing is foggy about what words or ideas are connected to others. Effective writing requires that every modifier be clearly moored to exactly what it is intended to describe, rather than some other word or idea. Free-floating modifiers risk conveying meaning that is, at best, ambiguous or, at worst, downright contrary to the drafter's in- tent.

In Defense Of Author Prominence: A Reply To Crespi And Korobkin, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We thank Greg Crespil and Russell Korobkin for their provocative responses to our author-prominence ranking of specialized law reviews. Crespi provides a thoughtful critique of the methodology we employ and the results we obtained. Korobkin shares some of Crespi's concerns, but he focuses his critique on the potential implications of our rankings (and rankings more generally). In this reply, we briefly address the more significant criticisms each of them raises.

Digital Legal Information: Ensuring Access To The "Official" Word Of The Law, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes, and regulations issued by federal and state entities are widely available on publicly accessible Internet Web sites. Worldwide, official legal information issued by international organizations and foreign governments is also becoming available on the Web. However, there are currently no standards for the production and authentication of digital documents. Moreover, the information is sometimes available only for a short time and then disappears from the site. Most of that digital information provides only a right of access, and no ownership, or control over the data, unless it is …

Leaving The Ballpark, J. Thomas Sullivan

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

Justice Stevens’s Sammy Sosa "leaving the ballpark" metaphor in City of Chicago v. Morales is used as a reminder that words may have multiple meanings.

Juries, Hindsight, And Punitive Damage Awards: Failures Of A Social Science Case For Change, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In their recent Arizona Law Review article entitled What Juries Can't Do Well: The Jury's Performance As a Risk Manager,' Professors Reid Hastie and W. Kip Viscusi purport to show that juries are likely to do a poor job in setting punitive damages, largely because jurors cannot avoid the influence of what is called "hindsight bias," or the tendency to see the likelihood of an event higher in retrospect than it would have appeared before it happened. In particular, they argue that hindsight bias and other cognitive biases undermine the utility of jury-set punitive damage awards as risk management devices. …