Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Content And Quality Of Legal Information And Data On The Internet With A Special Focus On The United States, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the United States today, digital versions of current decisions, bills, statutes and regulations issued by federal and state governments are widely available on publicly accessible Web sites. Worldwide, official (defined as “authoritative,” or “the official” word of the law) 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. No guidelines exist either to promote a uniform way to cite to digital …

The Importance Of Being Empirical, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal scholarship is becoming increasingly empirical. Although empirical methodologies gain important influence within the legal academy, their application in legal research remains underdeveloped. This paper surveys and analyzes the state of empirical legal scholarship and explores possible influences on its production. The paper advances a normative argument for increased empirical legal scholarship.

Legal Writing In The New Millennium: Lessons From A Special Teacher And A "Special Classroom", Kenneth F. Ripple

Journal Articles

After receiving the invitation to address this conference, I found my thoughts often returning to my own education in legal writing. As I recall, my legal writing experience in law school was not a very intensive—or positive—one. As was quite typical in that era (almost thirty-three years ago), the program at my law school was not very extensive: we wrote a memorandum of law and a brief under the guidance of a graduate law student.

My real legal writing education took place in the study of the Chief Justice of the United States. For the better part of five years, …

Sailing Through Designing Memo Assignments, Lorraine K. Bannai, Anne Enquist, Judith Maier, Susan Mcclellan

Faculty Articles

Sailing and designing memo assignments have a lot in common. At first, both can seem overwhelming - so much to learn, so much to organize sequentially, and so much to get right in a short period of time. Mistakes mean instability, lost time, and possibly capsizing. Avoiding the mistakes, a good skipper can break through to clean water and good air, and teaching writing can be exhilarating. The students and teacher both benefit from and enjoy working with an ideal memo assignment. The process is critical, but the destination is key. No memo assignment is effective if it results in …

A History Of Writing Advisors At Law Schools: Looking At Our Past, Looking At Our Future, Anne Enquist, Jessie Grearson

Faculty Articles

The authors, themselves writing advisors at The John Marshall Law School and Seattle University School of Law respectively, have recently surveyed both Directors of Legal Writing and Writing Advisors across the country to learn more about the phenomena of Writing Advisors in law schools. This article will report the results of that survey. First, however, the authors will give a brief history of the events surrounding the arrival of Writing Advisors at law schools, including the rise of the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement, and then they will describe how these events set the stage for Writing Advisors at law schools. Second, …

Interactive Class Editing, Kathleen Elliott Vinson

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Legal writing is a process. Writing, however, is not a process that occurs in a straight line. An important part of the writing process is editing. Editing during different stages of the writing process can reveal organizational as well as analytical problems, in addition to grammatical and spelling mistakes. As Justice Brandeis said, "[t]here is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” The time and extent spent on editing skills conveys the importance of editing. Devoting class time to editing and making it interactive allows students to focus on editing and practice their editing skills. In …

Critiquing And Evaluating Law Students' Writing: Advice From Thirty-Five Experts, Anne Enquist

Seattle University Law Review

While there are some differences of opinion about what is the best way to comment on and grade law students' writing, a consensus seems to be developing based on the experience and insights of those in the profession who have done the job the longest and survived to tell about it. To help articulate this consensus, I selected thirty-seven experienced legal writing professors and asked them to respond to a questionnaire about critiquing and evaluating law students' writing. My goal was to gather and record their wisdom, insights, and experience for other legal writing professors, particularly those who are new …

Legal Writing Scholarship: Point/Counterpoint, Jan M. Levine, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

Perhaps because the field of legal writing has now matured enough so that we professors constitute a critical mass of experienced teachers and scholars, we find ourselves frequently embroiled in debates about legal writing scholarship. What is it? Can we do it? Should we do it? Should it be considered part and parcel of our responsibilities as members of the law school world? To help us better present our shared view that legal writing professors not only can but should produce scholarship, we sought first to take on the role of devil’s advocate, presenting all the rationales we have heard …

"Meet My Mentor": A Collection Of Personal Reminiscences, Frank G. Houdek, Edmund P. Edmonds

Journal Articles

Contributors describe the mentoring they received as law librarians. Individually the pieces offer fascinating glimpses of individuals and relationships. Collectively, they demonstrate how important - and how varied - the process of mentoring has been and continues to be for the growth and evolution of the profession.

The Richness Of Contract Theory, Randy E. Barnett

Michigan Law Review

When I teach the doctrine of good faith performance, I assign an exchange between two distinguished contracts scholars, Robert Summers and Steven Burton, that has come to be known as the "Summers-Burton" debate. This debate is interesting not only for the contrasting views of its protagonists concerning the doctrine of good faith, but also because of the generational shift in modes of scholarship it represents. In the 1950s and 1960s, contracts scholars, like so many others, rejected so-called "conceptualist" or "formalist" approaches that attempted to dictate the outcome of cases with general concepts and rules. Contracts scholarship was dominated by …

Apparently Substantial, Oddly Hollow: The Enigmatic Practice Of Justice, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics, by William H. Simon, is one of the most thoughtful and important books in legal theory - not just legal ethics - published in the past ten years. Like David Luban's seminal contribution to legal ethics, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study, published a decade ago, Simon's book is a deliberate rival to accounts of lawyers' professional responsibility that begin with a command to zealous advocacy, end with a prohibition on outright illegal conduct, and offer nothing in between. Authors and commentators have grown increasingly dissatisfied with this as the basic …

Direct Democracy In America, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

The phrase "laboratories of democracy," as applied to the states, seems most often to mean something more like "democratic laboratories" - democratic testing grounds for various approaches to social problems. What sort of welfare reform will be most effective? Let Wisconsin try out Plan A, while Michigan experiments with Plan B. What combination of tort liability rules will achieve desired levels of compensation and deterrence? Let the states experiment with strict liability, comparative negligence, or various nofault schemes. It is also true, however, that the states are literally laboratories of democracy - arenas in which democratic institutions are themselves experimented …

Search Tools: Skills And Strategies, Robin Schard

Articles

No abstract provided.

Waiting With Brother Thomas, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In this Essay, Christopher Sagers argues that those schools of thought that could be called "doubtful"—that is, those predicated on suspicion of belief to some degree—share a range of similarities and, more importantly, are attacked through a set of common criticisms. He argues that the fundamental criticism of these "doubtful" schools of thought—that doubt leads us to nihilism and therefore must be bad—is a non sequitur. Furthermore, he continues, we reject doubt not because it is bad, but because it is difficult. Ultimately, he suggests ways to face the problems of nihilism or, rather, ways of understanding them as other …

Plain English Part Vi: Negatives Or The Power Of Positives, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This column is the last in a series' describing six"clear writing techniques" set out by the SEC in proposed rules to require that disclosures be written in Plain English. This last writing tip is to avoid "negative sentences and multiple negatives."

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Contents Of Legal Information On The Internet: U.S. Perspectives, Claire M. Germain

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This article examines the contents of legal data and information on the Internet, with a special focus on the United States. It then evaluates the quality of the data, its impact on legal research and access to legal information, and addresses some issues raised by the digital medium, such as its reliability and permanent access concerns.

Professional Responsibility: 1998 Survey Of Florida Law, Timothy P. Chinaris, Elizabeth Clark Tarbert

Law Faculty Scholarship

Continuing a trend, 1998 included a number of important developments in the area of professional responsibility law in Florida. Significant appellate court decisions, rule changes, and disciplinary actions potentially affect the practices of more than 58,000 members of The Florida Bar. This article reports and summarizes those developments by placing them in the framework of the various relationships in which lawyers typically operate. Part II looks at decisions affecting what must be viewed as the central relationship in this context: the relationship between lawyer and client. Part III examines developments pertaining to what may be the dominant relationship: the lawyer's …

Abstracting The Record, Terry Crabtree

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Lillich & Magraw Eds., The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal: Its Contribution To The Law Of State Responsibility, Charles H. Brower Ii

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Narrative In Legal Scholarship And Teaching, Jean C. Love

Faculty Publications

Storytelling-particularly storytelling written from an "outsider's" perspective-is a new form of legal writing that appears with increasing frequency on the pages of law reviews and specialized legal journals. At the same time, critics are questioning whether storytelling deserves to be classified as a form of legal scholarship. Perhaps storytellers are to be regarded as talented and creative writers, but do they truly deserve to be called legal scholars? At first, the debate was local, arising in the context of the deliberations of appointments committees and tenure committees. Now the debate is national, and it is being conducted on the pages …

Preface, Philip Girard

Dalhousie Law Journal

The foreword to the first issue of the Dalhousie Law Journal (September 1973) stated that the editors commenced the enterprise "without lofty pretensions." If the newjournal' s existence served "to encourage creative research and writing among law teachers, among students, and generally among the legal profession and related disciplines, that may be justification." The editors nonetheless concluded with a lofty enough mission statement: "we shall be endeavouring to produce a stimulating journal exemplifying those qualities that most people would characterize as scholarly, among them thoroughness, precision of thought, independence of judgment." The Editorial Board believes that the Journal has fulfilled …

A Computer-Assisted Legal Research And Writing Course, Jocelyn Downie, Michael Deturbide, Laura Fraser

Dalhousie Law Journal

In this paper, the authors describe and assess their experience with the use of WebCT (a computer program that facilitates the creation and management of courses using the Internet) in the Dalhousie Legal Research and Writing Program. They explain what WebCT is, why they decided to use it, and how they used it. They assess its inaugural use and conclude that, despite some difficulties, the pilot project was a success and WebCT can be a useful tool for other teachers of legal research and writing.

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.

Plain English Part V: Go Aggro Over Argot, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The SEC has set out six "dear writing techniques" to require that disclosures be written in Plain English. Previous columns have addressed the first four techniques. This column addresses the fiflh: replacing jargon and legalese with short common words.

Researching Cases On The Web, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Plain English Part Iv: Keep It Straight, Tabulate, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This column addresses tabular presentation of complex material, which is the fourth of six "clear writing techniques" set out in the SEC's proposed rules to require that disclosures be written in Plain English.' The first three of these techniques were discussed in the January, March, and May 1998 Scrivener articles.

Recent Books, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.

Holmes's Good Man: A Comment On Levinson And Balkin, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Sanford Levinson and J.M. Balkin's paper ("L & B") is refreshing in the attention it pays to Holmes's oft-neglected "good [man], who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience."¹ The good man provides a heuristic foil for Holmes's "bad man" whose conduct is motivated only by the potential material consequences, and thus L & B's analysis should help shed light on what is a puzzling metaphor in the folklore surrounding Holmes's The Path of the Law. L & B provide some interesting observations on the implications of …