Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Time To Blossom: An Inquiry Into Bloom’S Taxonomy As A Hierarchy And Means For Teaching Legal Research Skills, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Within law librarianship and legal education, there has been far too little scholarly engagement on the underlying pedagogy at the heart of legal research instruction. To correct this deficiency, law librarianship needs to open a dialogue and should consider adapting Bloom’s Taxonomy as a common schema for a collaborative effort.

This paper was initially presented at the "Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching," held at the University of Colorado Law School on June 21-22, 2009, as part of its Boulder Summer Conference Series. It follows the author's own recently published challenge to law librarianship and legal research instructors to …

Leveraging A Library Collection Through Collaborative Digitization Ventures, Femi Cadmus, Fred Shapiro

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Bobbitt, The Rise Of The Market State, And Race, George A. Martinez

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Meeting Students’ Demand For Models Of Good Legal Writing, Patricia Grande Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

First-year legal writing students always plead for model examples of the types of writing we teach. Though most legal writing texts include an appendix of sample legal documents, the students invariably ask for more. They insist that a multitude of samples are needed to fully grasp the structure and organizational approach that is expected of them. Their reasons for wanting models of good legal writing are not without merit. Interoffice memoranda, trial and appellate briefs, as well as the other kinds of legal documents we teach in the first-year writing curriculum are unlike anything our law students have previously …

The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years Of Teaching & Scholarship, Robin Boyle

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

BRITTANY FLOWE: Welcome everyone. I am Brittany Flowe, the Lead Articles editor of the Mercer Law Review. On behalf of all the students and faculty, we are truly grateful for your presence here today. We are excited and honored to be celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversa­ry of the Legal Writing Institute. Thank you all for being here; we are looking forward to a wonderful panel. Now, I would like to introduce Dean Daisy Hurst Floyd.

DEAN DAISY FLOYD: Thank you everyone. Good morning. It is my great privilege to welcome you to Macon, to Mercer University, and to Mercer University's …

The Relevance Of Results Generated By Human Indexing And Computer Algorithms: A Study Of West's Headnotes And Key Numbers And Lexisnexis's Headnotes And Topics, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

This article begins the investigation into the different ways results are generated in West's "Custom Digest" and in LexisNexis's "Search by Topic or Headnote" and by KeyCite and Shepard's. The author took ten pairs of matching headnotes from important federal and California cases and reviewed the results sets generated by each classification and citator system for relevance. The differences in the results sets for classification systems and for citator systems raise interesting issues about the efficiency and comprehensiveness of any one system, and the need to adjust research strategies accordingly

Penumbral Thinking Revisited: Metaphor In Legal Argumentation, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

In the modern jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, the controversy over the place of metaphor came directly into the spotlight in Griswold v. Connecticut. Justice Douglas, writing for the majority and relying in part on metaphoric reasoning for his argument, located a right to privacy in the penumbral area formed by emanations from specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights. The various opinions in Griswold represent a divide regarding the place of metaphoric reasoning in legal argument. Justice Douglas employs metaphoric reasoning, while several of his fellow justices either avoid it or reject it. Because the case has …

Discipline-Building And Disciplinary Values: Thoughts On Legal Writing At Year Twenty-Five Of The Legal Writing Institute, J. Christopher Rideout

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing: The View From Within, J. Christopher Rideout, Jill J. Ramsfield

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Tributes To Mary S. Lawrence, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

Front Matter includes Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review Volume 5 (2010).

Waging War Within The Constitution, Alberto R. Gonzales

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the United States' response to the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda from my perspective as Counsel to the President and then later as Attorney General. It reviews the actions of government lawyers and how federal courts have judged the implementation of U.S. government policy. It explains that U.S. government officials quickly understood that our nation was confronted with a non-state enemy fighting an unconventional war. This forced us to make a number of difficult decisions quickly about how best to fight this threat in a manner consistent with the United States' domestic and international legal …

Good Enough For Government Work: The Interpretation Of Positive Constitutional Rights In State Constitutions, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Law Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court ruled in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989) and reaffirmed in Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005) that absent conditions of confinement the Due Process Clause imposes no affirmative obligations upon government to protect an individual’s life, liberty, or property. These decisions reflect the Supreme Court’s broader understanding of the United States Constitution as a guarantor of negative rights but devoid of assurance of positive rights. Like the constitutions of many other countries, state constitutions have charted a different course. Unlike their federal counterpart, state …

Introduction To Symposium: Reasoning From Literature, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The “literary turn” in legal studies manifests in many ways in our legal discipline and practice. Be it with the birth of the study of law and literature in the 1980s, the growing attention to narrative theory and storytelling in the law in the 1990s, or the “cultural turn” in legal studies in the 21st century (as some scholars have called the cultural analysis of law), reasoning from literature seems commonplace. And yet it is still marginalized in legal studies as interdisciplinary, not “really law,” and lacking the core persuasive power that legal argumentation and doctrinal analysis do. This Symposium …

A Writing Life, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

This essay was written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), celebrated at Mercer University School of Law, LWI’s current home. In a sense the essay is retrospective, for it is written to honor the scholars whose work has moved us toward a vision of legal writing scholarship and all it can offer. Many of those experienced and inspiring scholars have kindly offered their advice for inclusion in this essay. That advice is probably the most important content included here, and it is placed, appropriately, at the end of the text as the essay’s …

Symposium, The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years Of Teaching And Scholarship, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

This is the transcript of Mercer Law Review’s Symposium, The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years of Teaching & Scholarship. In this Symposium Linda Edwards, among other panelists, discussed the work that goes into producing scholarship.

The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years Of Teaching & Scholarship, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley joins a panel of the elite of legal writing professors at Mercer University, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Legal Writing Institute in this transcript of the proceedings.

Writer's Block: The "Ins And Outs" Of Good Legal Writing, Part One, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Misplaced Modifiers - Say What, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Writer's Block: Why Punctuation Matters, Part Two, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.