Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

In Memory Of Dan Subotnik—Friend And Scholar, David M. Phillips

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Memories Of Marian Pink, Marian Pink

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Long, Deep, And Unbreakable Friendship, Henry Ramer

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stanley & Daniel: A Lifelong Friendship In Courts & Concert Halls, Stanley Sperber

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Touching Our Lives With Love And Grace: A Remembrance Of Dan Subotnik, Dr. Edward Crowe

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Memories Of My Father, Daniel Ezra Subotnik, Joseph E. Subotnik

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You): Billy Joel Lyrics In Legal And Medical Scholarship, Seuli Bose Brill, Christian H. Brill

Touro Law Review

Law and medicine are often considered to be among the least accessible professions, partly because of the heavy use of non colloquial jargon. This article examines more than 150 instances in which Billy Joel’s lyrics have been used to improve the accessibility of legal and medical scholarship. Legal and medical professionals have used the words of the “Piano Man” to discuss a variety of topics—everything from civil procedure to property rights and the COVID-19 pandemic to colorectal surgery. Nontraditional communications techniques of this type do not just contribute to the body of legal and medical scholarship; they also help professionals …

Should Judicial Opinions Be Read Like Statutes?, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

Should judicial opinions be interpreted with an eye to their purpose, context, or the intent of their authors, or should interpreters focus on the ordinary meaning of the text? Opinions present the same sorts of interpretive puzzles as other legal texts, and yet they have been omitted from the debates over interpretive methodology that dominate the fields of constitutional and statutory interpretation. The omission is no accident: the Supreme Court has stated repeatedly—and with increasing frequency in recent years—that judicial opinions are not to be read like statutes. Yet neither courts nor commentators have explained why the principles that ground …

Llm-Assisted Legal Propositions Identification From Party Arguments In The U.S. Supreme Court Briefs, Heng Zheng, Alex Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Merits briefs are central to U.S. litigation, serving as the primary means for parties to present arguments and persuade judges. Legal propositions in these merits briefs are the atomic units of arguments, whose relationships evolve throughout litigation and inform court decisions and precedent. Large language models (LLMs) have been applied to legal document review, but there is limited evidence on their ability to identify legal propositions in merits briefs. Given the labor-intensive nature of the task, we evaluate a human-AI collaborative approach to identifying legal propositions in the U.S. Supreme Court merits briefs, in which legal annotators review and revise …

Indefensibly Erroneous Scholarship, Michael L. Smith

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Follow The Money: A Historical And Bibliometric Reflection On The Rise Of Law And Economics, 1970-2025, Scott H. Dewey

Articles

From roughly 1970 to 2010, law and economics rose from the margins to a dominant position in American legal academia, accompanied by a dramatic increase in citations to law and economics scholarship. Citation analysis is often treated as a proxy for intellectual merit, but that assumption becomes questionable when ideas are advanced through systematic, well-funded, and sustained promotion aimed at serving specific political and economic interests. This study examines the right-wing funding networks that supported the rise of law and economics and analyzes the resulting bibliometric patterns in legal scholarship. By tracing these financial and citation dynamics, the study argues …

The Pedagogy Of Legal Synthesis, Stephen Mortellaro

Scholarly Articles

The ability to synthesize implicit legal principles from many ambiguous cases is a mark of a skilled attorney. But legal synthesis is notoriously challenging to teach, and law students typically receive little explicit guidance on how to synthesize. The literature likewise offers law professors little direction on how to impart the skill successfully. This Article serves as a guide for professors to effectively train law students to synthesize implicit legal principles. Drawing upon cognitive science, the study of logic, and educational research, this Article explains the challenges of learning legal synthesis and equips professors with pedagogical methods and curricular resources …

A Commemoration: 75th Anniversary Of The Catholic University Law Review, Veryl Victoria Miles

Scholarly Articles

This essay celebrates the 75th Anniversary of the Catholic University Law Review.  A retrospective of the law review’s first 50 years (1950-2000) was published in volume 50 by Professor Ralph Rohner.  Ralph J. Rohner, The 50th Anniversary of the Catholic University Law Review, 50 Cath. U. L. Rev. 267 (2001). Similarly, this essay reviews the law review publication experience and production output from 2001 through 2026, its contributions to the educational and scholarly development of student editors, student authors, and the greater body of legal scholarship.

How To Use Court Websites Like A Law Librarian: Tools And Tactics For Using Colorado's Court Websites For Legal Research, Annakatherine Wherren

Publications

No abstract provided.

Coached By A Custom Chatgpt And Ready For Trial, Staci J. Pratt

Publications

No abstract provided.

Staying True To Narrative Fidelity, Derek Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Translating The “Preposition + Which” Construction In English Legal Texts Into Indonesian, Doni Jaya

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Legal text translation is challenging because of its emphasis on semantic and syntactic faithfulness, while ST structures do not always have correspondent TL equivalents. One of such structures is the English “preposition + which” (PW) construction. This construction can be difficult to translate into Indonesian because the language does not always have ready-to-use connectors to produce a structurally faithful translation, often forcing translators to take the easy way of using ungrammatical and unnatural connectors which becomes the hallmark of the Indonesian legalese style. This research seeks to examine various ways to translate PW constructions in a more grammatical and …

An Exception To Prove The Rule: Rebutting The Presumption Of A Consistent And Definitive Construction, Miles C. Skedsvold

Mercer Law Review

Because the State of Georgia has had ten constitutions since declaring independence from Great Britain, the history of those prior constitutions has a lot to do with understanding the Constitution in force today. In particular, when a provision is carried forward from one constitution to the next without material change, the Supreme Court of Georgia’s decisions interpreting that provision under an earlier constitution can be a key piece of evidence for understanding its meaning in the later one.

The Supreme Court of Georgia calls this piece of the historical inquiry the presumption of a consistent and definitive construction: the provision …

Orenstein To Receive 2026 John Henry Wigmore Award For Lifetime Achievement, Maurer School Of Law - Indiana University

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Professor Aviva A. Orenstein, the Karen Lake Buttrey and Donald W. Buttrey Chair at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has been named the recipient of the 2026 John Henry Wigmore Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The John Henry Wigmore Award, presented by the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), honors individuals whose careers have made exceptional contributions to the field of evidence law. Previous recipients include leading scholars in evidence whose work has shaped teaching, scholarship, and practice.

“The award is presented to evidence scholars who have made leading contributions to the understanding of …

Rhetorical Strategies In Legal Argument: Their Influence On Judicial Decisions And Public Perception, Olivia Deluca

Honors College Theses

The relationship between rhetoric and law has long been debated by scholars, theorists, and practitioners. This project explores how rhetorical strategies used in judicial writing and legal discourse influence both judicial decision making and public perception of the law. Drawing on classical rhetorical theory, contemporary legal scholarship, and qualitative research, this study investigates how appeals to morality, precedent, and narrative shape legal legitimacy. The research incorporates interviews with legal professionals and textual analysis of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases to examine how rhetorical language both reflects and constructs legal authority. Findings suggest that rhetoric functions not only as a persuasive …