Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Research And The Professional : Navigating A Spectrum Of Legal Resources., Erin K Gow

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Legal research is complicated by the growing amount of information available, and there is evidence that legal practitioners require additional training in order to enhance their information literacy and legal research skills. Librarians have a key role to play in developing legal research training, and examples taken from Middle Temple's library are used to illustrate ways in which librarians can offer beneficial training to their library users. This involves assessing the skills, motivation, and needs of the average library user in order to design legal research training that is educationally sound and appealing to the target audience.

College Students And State Voter Id Laws: Can I Vote In The State Where I Attend College? I Have A Student Id Card, Tracey Carter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Presidential debates are purposely held on college campuses because it is well-known that college students are a large voting population who often serve as leaders when it comes to political activism and community involvement. Moreover, when students leave home to attend college, some of them want to vote in their college towns. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1979 landmark decision in Symm v. United States held that students have the constitutional right to register and vote where they attend college. However, despite the Symm’s decision and other constitutional protections, college students also have to be knowledgeable about …

Menu Labeling: The Unintended Consequences To The Consumer, Ellen A. Black

Law Faculty Scholarship

Why are Americans, along with the rest of the most populous nations, more overweight than twenty or thirty years ago? Most nutritionists and scientists agree that the answer is complex and multifaceted, with genetics, exercise, and diet all playing at least a partial role. Americans, for the last thirty years, have been reportedly eating out at restaurants more frequently than they have been eating at home; as a result, the restaurant industry has been blamed, in part, for the rise in obesity, based upon the presumption that more calories are consumed at restaurants than at home. Yet determining the underlying …

Reality Over Ideology: A Practical View Of Special Needs Voucher Programs, Elizabeth Adamo Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

In many school systems across the country, children with disabilities are not receiving the education that they are entitled to by law and need in order to reach their full potential. Although there are certainly triumphant examples of school systems that have succeeded in supporting students with special needs, there are unfortunately far too many examples of neglect, misunderstanding, and, ultimately, failure across the country. Into this struggling system emerges an expanding and difficult challenge that only adds further pressure. Due to the growing numbers of children diagnosed with Autism and the level of expertise required to deal with many …

Resolving The Great Divide In Pregnancy Discrimination, Lynn Ridgeway Zehrt

Law Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court granted certiorari on July 1, 2014, in the Fourth Circuit case of Young v. United Parcel Service, to resolve a fundamental disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over the extent to which employers are required to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Prior to granting certiorari, the Supreme Court invited the Solicitor General to submit an amicus curiae brief providing the position of the United States. It was the opinion of the Solicitor General that the Fourth Circuit “erred in holding that petitioner failed to establish a prima facie …

Twenty Years Of Compromise: How The Caps On Damages In The Civil Rights Act Of 1991 Codified Sex Discrimination, Lynn Ridgeway Zehrt

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article takes a novel approach and reexamines the legislative history surrounding the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 with a central focus on exploring the issue of capped damages. Part I begins by briefly contrasting and summarizing the diverging remedies available under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII. The article then shifts in Part II to an examination of the political climate and legislative history that forged the enactment of the 1991 Act, paying particular attention to the debate surrounding damages. This history reveals that many members of Congress had a discriminatory motive in capping damages …

Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company’s American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West’s digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring’s scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were …

Rife With Latent Power: Exploring The Reach Of The Irs To Determine Tax-Exempt Status According To Public Policy Rationale In An Era Of Judicial Deference, Amy L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarship

Using the case of Bob Jones University v. United States as a springboard, this article contends that the IRS has the legal authority to revoke the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt statuses of any institution that the IRS deems to be in violation of public policy. The first step to such an expansion might be to apply to private, religious universities that practice discrimination in areas other than race (e.g. gender and sexual orientation). This article traces the background and analysis of the Supreme Court decision in Bob Jones and how the Court left the door open for the IRS to make other …

The Quest For Finality: Five Stories Of White Collar Criminal Prosecution, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium article, Professor Dervan examines the issue of finality and sentencing. In considering this issue, he argues that prosecutors, defendants, and society as a whole are drawn to the concept of finality in various ways during criminal adjudications. Further, far from an aspirational summit, he argues that some outgrowths of this quest for finality could be destructive and, in fact, obstructive to some of the larger goals of our criminal justice system, including the pursuit of truth and the protection of the innocent. Given the potential abstraction of these issues, Professor Dervan decided to discuss the possible consequences …

Finding The Lost Involuntary Public Figure, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article begins in Part I through observation of the beginning and development of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the constitutional limitations imposed upon defamation actions under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Part II of the Article then briefly sets forth the constitutional framework that the Supreme Court imposed in 1974 on defamation actions in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. The Article then addresses in Part III how the pressures of the First Amendment have eroded the structure that Gertz built. In doing so, Part III specifically explores the expanding definition of who constitutes a public official …

Hiding In Plain Sight: "Conspicuous Type" Standards In Mandated Communication Statutes, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley defines the concept of mandated communication statutes in this examination of typeface, language, and the mind's ability to comprehend certain syntax. This article has a simple premise: when a government mandates written communication, it should present the mandated communication in a way that speeds comprehension. When communication is so important that the government is mandating the words and the presentation method, the writer and not the reader should not bear the burden of making sure that the information is comprehensible. In other words, the reader should not have to work to decipher the information; the writer should work …

Converting Benchslaps To Backslaps: Instilling Professional Accountability In New Legal Writers By Teaching And Reinforcing Context, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

A search in published and unpublished court decisions for derivations of phrases like "poorly written brief" or "failure to follow court rules" yields an alarming multitude of case opinions in which judges admonish lawyers of all levels of experience for shoddy briefs or for flouting non-negotiable substantive and procedural rules. Legal bloggers have affectionately dubbed these public reprimands "benchslaps."

Section I of this article provides a contextual background that professors and practitioners can share with rookie legal writers, using judicial opinions to demonstrate the eight most-common ways that attorney work product falls short of judges' expectations and, more importantly, how …

Crowdsourced Coursebooks, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai

Faculty Articles

Given increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. Working with a technology startup, we are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The …

Not Just For Scouting Anymore: Digital Badges For Legal Research Skills, Alcasid Hannah, Susan David Demaine, Catherine A. Lemmer, Benjamin J. Keele

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

"The Evolution Of Government Documents", Jennifer Morgan

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Law Librarianship in the 21st Century, a text for library and information science courses on law librarianship, introduces students to the rapidly evolving world of law librarianship. With no prior knowledge of the law required, students using this book will find practical answers to such questions as: What is law librarianship? How do you become a law librarian? How does law librarianship interrelate with the legal world? Individual chapters provide a concise treatment of such specialized topics as the history of law librarianship, international law, and government documents. Standard topics are dealt with as they apply to the law library, …

Scholarly Incentives, Scholarship, Article Selection Bias, And Investment Strategies For Today's Law Schools, Dan Subotnik, Laura Ross

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Toward A Jurisprudence Of The Civil Rights Acts, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is the nature of the “rights,” jurisprudentially, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act legally prescribed? And, more generally, what is a “civil right”? Today, lawyers tend to think of civil rights and particularly those that originated in the 1964 Act, as antidiscrimination rights: our “civil rights,” on this understanding, are our rights not to be discriminated against, by employers, schools, landlords, property vendors, hoteliers, restaurant owners, and providers of public transportation, no less than by states and state actors, on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality or disability. Contemporary civil rights scholarship overwhelmingly reflects the same conception: …

Proceed With Extreme Caution: Citation To Wikipedia In Light Of Contributor Demographics And Content Policies, Jodi L. Wilson

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Courts and advocates have shown an increasing willingness to cite to Wikipedia. This trend has piqued the attention of scholars, who have considered the permanency concerns raised by citations to Wikipedia and critiqued how courts and advocates have used Wikipedia. This Article adds to the growing scholarship on the Wikipedia citation trend by examining the contours of the Wikipedia contributor crowd and the principles underlying Wikipedia's content in order to better inform the evaluation of Wikipedia as a potential authoritative source. Part I provides an overview of the Wikipedia citation trend in cases and federal appellate briefs. Part II describes …

Meeting The Challenges Of Instructing International Law Graduate Students In Legal Research, Nina E. Scholtz, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching international LL.M. students legal research offers its own peculiar challenges. The brevity of the LL.M. program and the limited time available for thoroughly introducing basic research concepts have made it particularly difficult, but the innovative and creative methods of instruction highlighted in this article have provided good solutions.

Encouraging Engaged Scholarship: Perspectives From An Associate Dean For Research, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.