Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing: Students, Scholars, And Sources In The Law Library, Jeanne Price

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Say The Magic Word: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Contract Drafting Choices, Lori D. Johnson

Scholarly Works

Drafters of complex contracts often face a thorny dilemma – determining whether to retain “magic words” included in form documents, especially when considering the advice of current contract style scholars advocating for the removal of all traditional contract prose. But the drafter need not remove all terms that serve as elegant shorthand for more convoluted legal concepts, particularly where the inclusion of the term advances client interests. The application of rhetorical criticism – the analysis of methods of communicating ideas – to drafters’ use of the term “time is of the essence” sheds light on the dominant motivations of drafters …

Scholarship Against Desire, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

This article uses my own experience navigating the law review placement process to reflect on the dynamics that shape intellectual life at American law schools. My recent work focuses on the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. At its heart, it is about the law’s role in shaping the precursor to pregnancy—heterosexual sex. When I began researching this topic what I was most curious about was how law and culture might conspire to foster connections that are more loving and less violent, more authentic and less alienated. Pursuing this topic—which would entail exploring big existential questions to which I …

The Three-Act Argument: How To Write A Law Article That Reads Like A Good Story, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

Why do so many law articles—my own included—leave readers cold? One reason may be that they lack fundamental elements that make up a good story. They lack tension. They lack narrative arc. Over my years teaching seminars and exchanging drafts with colleagues, I’ve developed a recipe that helps me organize ideas into a form that better engages the reader. I’ve also found it to be conducive to a richer, more generative writing process.

The recipe is inspired by guides on dramatic plot. It has three parts: exposition, confrontation, and resolution. The exposition introduces the conflict. In many instances, this conflict …

Mental Illness In The Library: Ten Tips To Better Serve Patrons, Nick Harrell, Cindy Guyer

Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Precedent, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

Ms. Whisner looks at the concept of precedent in the case law arena and discusses how to handle cases from parallel and lower courts, including unpublished decisions. She offers tips to help make decisions when using precedent, including consulting secondary sources and key numbers.

Creac In The Real World, Diane B. Kraft

Cleveland State Law Review

This article will examine the extent to which common legal writing paradigms such as CREAC are used by attorneys in the “real world” of practice when writing on the kinds of issues law students may encounter in the first-year legal writing classroom. To that end, it will focus on the analysis of two factor-based criminal law issues: whether a defendant was in custody and whether a defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In focusing on “first-year” issues, the article seeks not to examine whether organizational paradigms are used at all in legal analysis, but to discover whether and how …

Legislation And Regulation In The Core Curriculum: A Virtue Or A Necessity?, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The first-year curriculum at American law schools has been remarkably stable for more than 100 years. Many would say ossified. At Harvard, the First-Year Course of Instruction in 1879-80 consisted of Real Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, and Civil Procedure. These five courses-focused heavily on judge-made common law-dominated Harvard's IL curriculum from the law school's founding into the 21st century. The same five subjects have long commanded the primary attention of first-year students at Fordham, founded in 1905, and at virtually every other U.S. law school throughout the 20th century. Starting in the 1990s, however, a growing …

Front Matter

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review Volume 10 (2015).

Intentionalism Justice Scalia Could Love, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

There is something useful, indeed beautiful, about a work that carefully and eloquently explores a new idea or reexamines an old one. The Nature of Legislative Intent is therefore useful and beautiful, and it offers much of philosophical value for textualist and non-textualist alike. but it offers little of practical consequence and is therefore unlikely to advance the ball outside of the hall of academia, not simply because of the failure of judges to take legal scholarship seriously (which is there loss, as well as sosciety's), but because on its own terms it cannot.

More Than Decisions: Reviews Of American Law Reports In The Pre-West Era, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the early nineteenth century, both general literary periodicals and the first American legal journals often featured reviews of new volumes of U.S. Supreme Court and state court opinions, suggesting their importance not only to lawyers seeking the latest cases, but to members of the public. The reviews contributed to public discourse through comments on issues raised in the cases and the quality of the reporting, and were valued as forums for commentary on the law and its role in American society, particularly during debates on codification and the future of the common law in the 1820s. James Kent saw …

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

Law Journals have been under heavy criticism for as long as we can remember. The criticisms come from all quarters, including judges, law professors, and even commentators at large. In an address at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference almost a decade ago, for example, Chief Justice Roberts complained about the “disconnect between the academy and the profession.” More pointedly, he continued, “[p]ick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was …

Every Document Its Depository: Lessons Learned From An Intercampus Transfer, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Orwell's Six Cures To Bad Writing, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell said among the many bad habits replete in written English are the use of dying metaphors, poor choice of appropriate verbs and nouns, pretentious dictions, and meaningless words. Sound familiar? He also offered ways to overcome these habits.

When The Story Is Too Good To Be True: A Lawyer's Role In Resisting The Lure Of Narrative, Jeanne Kaiser, Scott Brown

Faculty Scholarship

Storytelling is important in legal persuasion. The power of a good story is why an attorney strives to mold the facts of a case into a tale with clear heroes and villains. High profile bullying stories and the reaction to those stories by prosecutors, legislators, and the legal academy provide examples of lawyers’ susceptibility to the power of an emotional narrative. This Article explores how social problems, like those relating to Phoebe Prince, Tyler Clementi, and Meagan Meiers, are likely to seem more real and pressing when presented in human terms as opposed to the abstract consequences.

Where Truth And The Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn From The Experience Of Non-Fiction Writers About The Limits Of Storytelling, Jeanne Kaiser

Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter examines what can be gained and what can be lost by using storytelling in legal writing. After reviewing some basic principles of legal storytelling, the Chapter reviews some lessons that can be learned from the experience of the New Journalists who adopted literary techniques in their non-fiction work. In the end, the Author concludes that while there is much value in using the tools of fiction in legal writing, it is only with a blend of narrative and analysis that we most successfully do our jobs as lawyers.

In Defense Of Empirical Legal Studies, Christina L. Boyd

Scholarship@WashULaw

The empirical legal studies movement, or ELS, is positioned to provide an important scholarly impact. As noted ELS scholar Theodore Eisenberg once put it, “[a]cross a broad range of legal issues, empirical studies can inform policymakers and the public. Legally trained social scientists have unique opportunities to enhance description and understanding of the legal system.” By all accounts, this influence is well underway. ELS scholarship has been present in law schools since at least the 1920s and is on the rise in recent years, with important empirical insights gained into legal subjects such as error rates in capital punishment convictions, …

Habermas, The Public Sphere, And The Creation Of A Racial Counterpublic, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas documented the historical emergence and fall of what he called the bourgeois public sphere, which he defined as “[a] sphere of private people come together as a public . . . to engage [public authorities] in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” This was a space where individuals gathered to discuss with each other, and sometimes with public officials, matters of shared concern. The aim of these gatherings was not simply discourse; these gatherings …

Research Analysis And Planning: The Undervalued Skill In Legal Research Instruction, Robert M. Linz

Publications

This article describes a method of research analysis and planning for legal problems. It introduces the framework of research plan, log, and product and provides a detailed research plan and log that students can use as a template for learning research. The article suggests how to teach the method in legal research classes, shares some of the author's experiences in teaching the method, and addresses some possible criticisms of this approach.

Research Strategies Using Headnotes: Citators And Relevance, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

No abstract provided.