Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Inspired by “‘A Day in My Law Library Life,’ Circa 1997,” this compilation collects descriptions of a day in the lives of law librarians in 2018. The descriptions provide a current snapshot and historical record of the law library profession, with similarities to, and differences from, the profession of 1997.

Can Accessibility Liberate The "Lost Ark" Of Scholarly Work?: University Library Institutional Repositories Are "Places Of Public Accommodation”, 52 Uic J. Marshall L. Rev. 327 (2019), Raizel Liebler, Gregory Cunningham

UIC Law Review

For any body of knowledge – an ark of power or a corpus of scholarship – to be studied and used by people, it needs to be accessible to those seeking information. Universities, through their libraries, now aim to make more of the scholarship produced available for free to all through institutional repositories. However, the goal of being truly open for an institutional repository is more than the traditional definition of open access. It also means openness in a more general sense. Creating a scholarship-based online space also needs to take into consideration potential barriers for people with disabilities. This …

Research Resources For Michigan Criminal Law, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

Few areas of the law are as consequential to the personal lives of those involved as criminal law. The law can, and does, change quickly, and attorneys need to stay abreast of the latest developments to effectively represent their clients. Thankfully, modern government bodies publish current primary law (and many useful secondary sources) online. The sites outlined below will take users to reliable sources of Michigan criminal law and procedure.

Tuesday Morning Detective Work, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

The author describes her process for tracking down information requested by a law student.

Prometheus, Sisyphus, Themis: Three Futures For Legal Education Research, Paul Maharg

Articles & Book Chapters

In almost every jurisdiction regulatory review of legal education has become more complex. It has not been matched by concomitant increase in the sophistication and complexity of the empirical research base, nor in the organisation of that research. As we pointed out in the LETR Report (2013), there are significant gaps in legal educational research. There is little co-ordination of research initiatives between academy and regulatory bodies on a sustained basis. There is little organisation by the academy of the increasing volume of research that it produces on legal education: a significant lack of longitudinal studies, very few ongoing and …

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Faculty Scholarship

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

Buried Treasure: Excavating Foreign Law From Civil Pleadings Filed In U.S. Federal Courts, Loren Turner

Articles

The Animal Science case is one of many cases in U.S. federal courts wherein parties rely in some measure on foreign law as part of a claim or defense. Yet, none of our legal research databases tracks and catalogs the foreign law and legal analysis filed in our courts. In fact, none of our legal research databases even provides an efficient way to find the foreign law and legal analysis filed in our courts. Despite the increasing frequency of cross-border litigation and the various types of cases that trigger a need to determine foreign law, access to foreign law as …

At The Intersection Of Health And Justice: How The Health Of American Indians And Alaska Natives Is Disproportionately Affected By Disparities In The Criminal Justice System, Bette Jacobs, Mehgan Gallagher, Nicole Heydt

Belmont Law Review

American Indian and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) are a neglected population in the United States. Their health and welfare needs are often swept aside and, because of historical treaty agreements with the United States government, they suffer disparities in the justice system and, consequently, poor health. A deep look into everyday life for an AI/AN tells a story of poverty and relatively low life expectancy, proportionately high incidences of disease, high rates of incarceration, and prolific alcohol and substance abuse. AI/ANs are incarcerated at a higher rate proportionately than their white counterparts. They experience harsher sentences, due in part to jurisdictional …

Title Vii Discrimination Protections & Lgbt Employees: The Need For Consistency, Certainty & Equality Post-Obergefell, Regina Hillman

Belmont Law Review

This article explores employment protections against discriminatory practices for LGBT Americans. Factors such as jurisdiction, employment type, and geography all play a role in whether or not protections are extended to LGBT individuals. This article also examines Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the role of the EEOC in enforcing federal laws prohibiting discrimination, as well as executive orders and protections.

The Wake Of Wayfair: Addressing State Taxation Issues After South Dakota V. Wayfair., Leigh Stanfield

Belmont Law Review

This student note examines the impact of e-commerce on state tax revenue. It explores internet retail jurisprudence, and the South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. decision. It explores state approaches to taxing e-commerce revenue, as well as continuing issues in e-commerce taxation, and concludes with a model provision.

All Health Care Is Local: Exploring The Roles Of Cities And States In Health Care Delivery And Reform Keynote #1, Jeremy Faison

Belmont Health Law Journal

I'm going to talk to you about the legal justification for Tennessee to expand cannabis for certain sick Tennesseans. I believe I can prove to you if I had enough time that a prohibition on the cannabis plant was an unjust law from the beginning. So first of all the justification of what I'm doing, the justification starts with one thing. First of all, it was prevalent and commonplace in society for 5,000 years that we can trace humankind and nothing was bad. The next justification of what I'm doing is: America is there. In a poll from January 11th …

Defusing Bullies, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Drawing Connections Between Artificial Intelligence, Cognition, And Legal Skills, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Learning From Feminist Judgments: Lessons In Language And Advocacy, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

Judicial decision-making is not a neutral and logical enterprise that involves applying clear rules to agreed-upon facts. Legal educators can and should help students learn more about how judges actually go about making their decisions. The study of re-imagined judicial decisions, such as the alternative judgments from various Feminist Judgments Projects, can enrich the study of law in multiple ways. First, seeing a written decision that differs from the original can help students think “outside the box” constructed by the original opinion by showing them a concrete example of another perspective written in judicial language. Second, the rewritten judgments show …

Bringing The Court Into The Classroom: Suggestions For How To Craft Exercises For Upper-Level Courses Using Real Practitioners' Briefs, Benjamin Halasz

Articles

When I came to teach after practicing for over a decade, I wanted my students to learn to write by using materials from real clients and cases. I quickly found that’s easier said than done. But through experimentation and discussions with experienced colleagues, I found several successful ways to put students into the role of writing parts of a “real” brief—one that uses a real case and real facts—for short, in-class exercises in upper-level courses.

Several articles tout the benefits of using briefs as examples, an enthusiasm I join. But this article focuses on using cases, and especially briefs, as …

The Most Revealing Word In The United States Reports, Richard Primus

Articles

The most prominent issue in NFIB v. Sebelius was whether Congress’s regulatory power under the Commerce Clause stops at a point marked by a distinction between “activity” and “inactivity.” According to the law’s challengers, prior decisions about the scope of the commerce power already reflected the importance of the distinction between action and inaction. In all of the previous cases in which exercises of the commerce power had been sustained, the challengers argued, that power had been used to regulate activity. Never had Congress tried to regulate mere inactivity. In NFIB, four Justices rejected that contention, writing that such …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Seven Recommendations, G. Edward White, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

Richard Fallon likely did not plan the publication of this book to coincide with the aftermath of the Kavanaugh hearings or the phrase “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” After all, the author has been writing about legitimacy and the law for over a decade, and this book brings together many of his ideas in previously published law review articles. But the timing could not be better, all the more so for young scholars or those otherwise new to Fallon’s writings who will appreciate an accessible account for why and when Supreme Court decisions merit legitimacy …

Stylish Legal Citation, Alexa Z. Chew

Working Papers

Can legal citations be stylish? Is that even a thing? Yes, and this Article explains why and how. The usual approach to writing citations is as a separate, inferior part of the writing process, a perfunctory task that satisfies a convention but isn’t worth the attention that stylish writers spend on the “real” words in their documents. This Article argues that the usual approach is wrong. Instead, legal writers should strive to write stylish legal citations—citations that are fully integrated with the prose to convey information in a readable way to a legal audience.

Prominent legal style expert Bryan Garner …

References To Television Shows In Judicial Opinions And Written Advocacy (Part I), Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Allowing Autistic Academics The Freedom To Be Autistic: The Ada And A Neurodiverse Future In Pennsylvania And Beyond, Brandon Stump

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article focuses on those Autistics who have the ability, in terms of intellect credential, and measurable skill, to enter the workplace. In particular, this Article addresses Autistics who are academics and teach at the collegiate level, specifically in the American legal classroom. I have chosen a narrow subset of a broad community to make a targeted argument for employment protection which can help expand the law for the entire Autistic community. While we are different than neurotypically developed persons, "[m]any with [Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)] have a high attention to detail and the ability to sustain intense concentration in …