Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …

The Tangled Web: Teaching The Meaning Of Legal Citations In The Online Age, Matthew L. Timko, Heather J.E. Simmons

College of Law Faculty Publications

Online citations are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, a citation embedded in a digital document can usually be retrieved by clicking on a link, but on the other, this process eliminates the need to understand any of the information inherent in the citation. To a law student who has only conducted research online, a legal citation is like a wireless passkey—a random string of characters that has no meaning. It is therefore unsurprising that law students have trouble distinguishing between a statute and a regulation. Citations underpin the entire legal research process, tying everything together …

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Improved Citators Through Improved Citations, Andrew J. Martineau

Articles

This article shows the continued need for the adoption of a universal, medium- and vendor-neutral citation format by examining how negative case treatment can be discerned algorithmically from Bluebook signals. Although traditional citations to case reporters are treated as machine-readable identifiers by contemporary research databases, the shortcomings of this format result in unnecessary errors and lag time in citators that discern negative treatment information from Bluebook-formatted citations alone. By adopting a universal citation format, as well as a small set of citation "best practices, " we would see significant improvements in these kinds of purely algorithmic citators. The greater the …

Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea For Adopting Doi, Valeri Craigle, Aaron Retteen, Benjamin Keele

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

As librarians, we do a fair amount of research online for ourselves and the faculty and students we serve. As researchers, we know that there is nothing more frustrating than encountering a dead link to a much-needed article, particularly when there are deadlines to meet. Dead links (link/ reference rot) can be a particularly frequent occurrence for law review articles because the law review societies that publish them have not yet adopted standards for preserving online access to them, particularly the adoption of a standard for implementing persistent URLs.

This Practical Insight is a plea to law reviews and law …

Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins

Other Publications

The overarching theme of Volume 19 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD is how legal communication shapes the law, and how doers of legal writing can use their resources to make it better. The volume begins with a fascinating article from Aaron Kirschenfeld and Alexa Chew, “Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts.” In their article, Professors Kirschenfeld and Chew shed light on whether the switch from print research to digital research has changed the way that law students and lawyers conduct research. To do so, the article uses the “citation stickiness” metric, which analyzes whether …

Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak

Other Publications

It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …

Passion Projects In Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute To Igor Kavass And His Personal Mission To Acquire And Organize U.S. International Agreements, Loren Turner

Articles

In December 2020, Oona Hathaway, Curtis Bradley, and Jack Goldsmith, law professors at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard, respectively, published their article, The Failed Transparency Regime for Executive Agreements: An Empirical and Normative Analysis, in the Harvard Law Review. The article reveals that the U.S. executive branch consistently fails to comply with federal requirements to report and publish the international agreements it makes with foreign countries. As a result, Congress and the American public regularly lack access to legal information to which they are entitled under federal law. Additionally, Hathaway, Bradley, and Goldsmith identify a particular time when our already-inadequate access …

Race And Lawyering In The Legal Writing Classroom, Danielle L. Tully

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry

Articles

Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.

Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry

Articles

Good writing, I often tell my students, is “anticipating the edits of your boss.” I then clarify that the definition of “boss” in that statement is intentionally expansive. A supervisor at work can count. A teacher in school can count. So can a valued customer or client. he key is to start thinking about two things: 1) the actual people who are going to review your writing; and 2) the likely changes they’ll make to it. By implementing those changes yourself— before the document ever hits your boss’s desk or inbox—you can save them a lot of time and cognitive …

Toward A Fair And Sustainable Corporate Governance System: Reflections On Leo Strine, Jr.'S Writing On Institutional Investors, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to contribute to this Festschrift for my friend, mentor, and co-author, Leo Strine, Jr. It is also a pleasure to revisit his vast body of work and to re-experience the breadth and depth of his scholarship, as well as reflect on his unparalleled influence on the development of corporate law that he brought about while presiding over its most influential courts for twenty-one years.

In thinking about this essay, I recalled a conversation that I had with “CJS” when I was serving as his law clerk. In this conversation, he decried (with James Taylor blasting in …

Let's All Be..Georgia? Expanding Access To Justice For Incarcerated Litigants By Rewriting The Rules For Writing The Law, Ashley Krenelka Chase

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Humanizing Transactional Documents: Why And How Transactional Drafters Should Use Narrative Techniques, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

The core of many transactional documents will be the acquisition, creation, or exchange of property or services. Yet, transactional documents are not only descriptive legal devices that dictate the exchange of widgets for cash. They are multifaceted documents that have the ability to do more than memorialize a transaction and create the private laws between the parties. As narrative texts, transactional documents tell the stories of the parties' relationship, whether it be an employment agreement, trust document, or purchase and sale agreement. Transactional documents present necessary and relevant information as a series of linked events where the transacting parties become …

Charles Dickens' Novels In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article examines written judicial opinions that contain references to novels by Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the British novelist and social critic who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Age. Americans today still read Dickens’ best-known novels, and the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal and state courts have cited and quoted from them.

Who Are You Protecting?: A Feminist Analysis Of Gay And Trans Panic Defense Bans, How They Are Defined, And Who They Protect, Tyler S. Sesker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As of April 2022, sixteen U.S. states ban Gay panic and Trans panic criminal defenses. These state-law prohibitions stemmed from several high-profile murder trials, focusing on the identity of the decedent, including the killings of Matthew Shepard and Latisha King. Between 1970 and 2020, criminal defenses interrogating the gender identity or sexual identity of victims of violence were used at least 104 times, with nearly a third of those cases resulting in reduced criminal charges and penalties. Today, in thirty-four states, the same tactics remain legal. Applying a feminist and outsider legal lens, this study engages in a textual analysis …

Reimagining Langdell's Legacy: Puncturing The Equilibrium In Law School Pedagogy, Danielle L. Tully, Rachel Gurvich, Laura Webb, Alexa Chew, Jane Cross, Joy Kanwar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

St. Thomas Law Review

Front Matter includes Title Page, Masthead, advisors, and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 35, Issue 1, Fall 2022.

Making Space For Online Research Experiments In Law School Courses, Hilary Evans Cameron, Sean Rehaag

Articles & Book Chapters

This reflective article explores opportunities for integrating online research experiments into large law school courses. It does so by drawing on the experience of the authors with an online research experiment involving simulated refugee adjudication undertaken with the full cohort of 1L students in a Canadian faculty of law. The article describes the context for the research, sets out the lessons that the authors learned about conducting experimental research, and describes the positive feedback provided by student participants. The article concludes with a recommendation by the authors that other legal scholars consider integrating research experiments into law school courses, both …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.