Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Perils Of Hyperbole, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this column for Kentucky Bar Association's magazine (B&B - Bench & Bar), Professor Diane B. Kraft makes suggestions about avoiding hyperbole in legal writing.

Animal Law Developments, Virginia C. Thomas

Library Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Getting Into The Field, Jay A. Mitchell

Journal of Food Law & Policy

A group of students enrolled in a law school clinic wanders through a large farmers' market. They stop to chat with the proprietors of a farm that has sold vegetables at the market for many years. They visit with a cheesemaker and an apple grower. A second group learns about the economic costs of organic production from a farmer and talks with an olive oil producer. Both sets of students seem unusually attentive to their surroundings. That may be because the first group helped the sponsor of the market rework the market's rules and regulations, and the second developed a …

Low Cost Alternatives For Legal Research: Using Casemaker And Loislaw, Emily Janoski-Haehlen

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Beating The Bluebook Blues: A Response To Judge Posner, Stephen M. Darrow, Jonathan J. Darrow

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Judge Richard A. Posner's recent critique (The Bluebook Blues) of the maddening hypertrophy of The Bluebook is surely a refreshing voice of sanity for the multitudes of law students and legal professionals who have had occasion to consult it. Even at Harvard Law School, the home of its founding institutional sponsor, The Bluebook's labyrinthine rules annually aggravate a fresh crop of otherwise remarkably stoic future lawyers. But while many of Posner's observations regarding The Bluebook are astute, we posit that both form and uniformity are important for citations, and we suggest citation-formatting software as a means of maximizing the utility …

Unequaled Expertise: Childress And Davis's Federal Standards Of Review, Henry Deeb Gabriel

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Abandoning Law Reports For Official Digital Case Law, Peter W. Martin

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Does The Readability Of Your Brief Affect Your Chance Of Winning An Appeal?, Lance N. Long, William F. Christensen

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Abandoning Law Reports For Official Digital Case Law, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social …

Ab Fab Legal Apps: Legal Research Applications For Handheld Devices, Sharon Bradley

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

The term “app” has exploded into general use. The term has been around for a long time as the nickname for application, or any piece of software that works on a system. Now when people are talking about apps, they are usually talking about small programs specifically made for mobile devices. Along with the explosion of general purpose apps, come many designed and/or suited for busy, highly-mobile legal professsionals.

Fantastic Facts About The 50 States: Websites For State Legal Research, Wendy E. Moore

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

Sometimes you need legal information from states other than Georgia. While you may feel comfortable knowing where to look for Georgia materials on the Internet, you may be less certain when information is needed concerning Florida, Tennessee, or even Nebraska. This paper is a survey of websites that will help you locate legal information and resources at the state level.

Gateways To Legal Information: Best-Bet Internet Portals, Suzanne R. Graham

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

MSN and Yahoo! are examples of horizontal portals that appeal to broad segments of the population by providing a wide array of popular culture news. For 8 to 5 endeavors, the Web also has many industry portals or vertical portals, including portals targeting law professionals and legal scholars. Finding a portal and setting it to be one’s browser home page can be an easy way to keep up with information and to launch targeted searches from a familiar interface.

Justice Jackson And The Second Flag-Salute Case: Reason And Passion In Opinion-Writing, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In 1943, the Supreme Court handed down West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. With Justice Robert H. Jackson writing for the six-Justice majority, the Court upheld the First Amendment right of Jehovah's Witnesses schoolchildren to refuse to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, state-imposed obligations that the children and their parents contended were acts of idolatry that violated biblical commands. Judge Richard A. Posner has said that Justice Jackson's effort "may be the most eloquent majority opinion in the history of the Supreme Court."

What Is A Judicial Author?, Peter Friedman

Mercer Law Review

Martha Woodmansee has pointed out that

the law has yet to be affected by the "critique of authorship" initiated by Foucault and carried forward in the rich variety of post-structuralist research that has characterized literary studies during the last two decades. Indeed, . . . it would seem that as creative production becomes more corporate, collective, and collaborative, the law invokes the Romantic author all the more insistently.

Woodmansee wrote about the conceptions of authorship that legal institutions bring to bear in deciding copyright-related disputes.2 Nevertheless, the law's ignorance of the "critique of authorship" includes a willful ignorance of the …

Document Design For Lawyers: The End Of The Typewriter Era, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This article discusses simple design rules that you can follow in documents that need not comply with court rules and some that you may use even in documents that must comply.

Outcomes & Assessment: A Golden Opportunity For Lrw Professors, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The American Bar Association is currently discussing drafts of a proposal to shift the law school accreditation standards from inputs measurements (such as numbers of books, faculty student ratios, etc.) to outcomes assessment. While still in discussion, this shift has the potential to create profound change in legal education. For the first time, law schools may be held accountable – beyond the bar exam – for what and how they teach their students. Law schools all across the country are busy trying to determine what this will mean, and how to go about meeting the new ABA standard.

New Ways To Teach Drafting And Drafting Ethics, Lisa Penland, David I.C. Thomson, Susan Duncan, Karen J. Sneddon, Susan M. Chesler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

As foreign as it can seem to not be in a physical classroom with bodies sitting in the chairs listening, it is a very different way of teaching but it can be very effective. If you go through this process of developing and dividing outcomes, dividing modules, and selecting the right technology, it can work. And that is kind of a scary thought to some people. Perhaps not people who have come to this section today or to this conference about What's Next, but for many of our colleagues, this is kind of a scary thought – that you might …

Clarion Call Or Sturm Und Drang: A Response To Pierre Schlag's Lecture On The State Of Legal Scholarship, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Precedent And Justice, William D. Bader, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

Precedent is the cornerstone of common law method. It is the core mechanism by which the common law reaches just outcomes. Through creation and application of precedent, common law seeks to produce justice. The appellate courts' practice of issuing unpublished, non-precedential opinions has generated considerable discussion about the value of precedent, but that debate has centered on pragmatic and formalistic values. This essay argues that the practice of issuing non-precedential opinions does more than offend constitutional dictates and present pragmatic problems to the appellate system; abandoning precedent undermines justice itself. Issuance of the vast majority of decisions as nonprecedential tears …