Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

From Clause A To Clause Z: Narrative Transportation And The Transactional Reader, Susan M. Chesler, Karen J. Snedden

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (January 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

From The Courtroom To The Classroom: How A Litigator Became A Transactional Drafting Professor, Amy Bauer

Publications

No abstract provided.

Inside The Black Box Of Search Algorithms, Susan Nevelow Mart, Joe Breda, Ed Walters, Tito Sierra, Khalid Al-Kofahi

Publications

A behind-the-scenes look at the algorithms that rank results in Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, Lexis Advance, and Westlaw.

Taxing Combat, Samuel Kan

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

When you are being shot at or dodging landmines you are in a combat zone. Diplomatic niceties aside, these brave warriors are in danger because of the policies of their Government and we must take care of them. Quite frankly, we must act to insure that we do not have a repeat of what happened in Somalia. In Somalia, the families of the soldiers who lost their lives could not receive the benefits that should have gone to them under the Tax Code because the President never declared it a combat zone.

We don’t know exactly where we’re at in …

Predetermined? The Prospect Of Social Determinant-Based Section 1115 Waivers After Stewart V. Azar, Griffin Schoenbaum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the “Secretary”) to waive some of Medicaid’s requirements so states can enact “demonstration projects.” A demonstration project is an experiment a state can conduct by modifying aspects of its Medicaid program. To waive Medicaid’s requirements for this purpose, the Secretary must determine that the proposed demonstration project will likely assist in promoting Medicaid’s objectives.

Using this standard, President Trump’s Secretary has approved waiver requests to enact demonstration projects that contain “community engagement” requirements. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has heard each …

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stepping Up Access To The Indiana Code: Partnering For Increased Access And Preservation, Susan David Demaine, Benjamin J. Keele, Hannah Alcasid

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Live And Learn: Live Critiquing And Student Learning, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

After nearly fifteen years of teaching first-year and upper-level legal writing courses and commenting on thousands of student papers, I decided to experiment with a new way of giving feedback. In a break from the traditional written feedback I had become accustomed to in the form of margin comments and a combination of line edits and end notes, I opted to live a little and learn a new practice: live critiquing. Live critiquing is essentially the process of giving students feedback on their work “live” or in-person, rather than in writing. In the most liberal approach to live critiquing, …

The Legal Imagination: Studies In The Nature Of Legal Thought And Expression, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

This book, now available in a 45th-anniversary edition, is a marvel for its breadth and creativity. It remains a must-read for lawyers, law students, and law professors, even those who are not familiar with the Law as Literature movement for which the book was a founding contribution. Those who read it decades ago would be well served by a revisit because the book’s care and attention to legal language remain uniquely powerful.

Finding Balance: Using Employment Law Problems To Achieve Multiple Learning Goals In Persuasive Legal Writing, Rosa Castello

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Legal Writing professors, like myself, face the same challenge each new semester: how can I effectively and efficiently help students learn one of the most important skills for a practicing lawyer? And one large hurdle in this quest to make our students good legal writers is creating a trial motion or appellate brief problem that helps them develop the particular skills required for persuasive legal writing. The act of creating the problem is sometimes like tightrope walking̶ finding just the right balance of facts and law to challenge students and help develop and enhance vital research, analytical, organizational, writing, …

One Legal Argument, Robin Boyle-Laisure

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

A governing rule may be composed of a single legal argument, or multiple legal arguments, particularly if the client’s question requires analysis of multiple elements or factors. Each legal argument that an attorney builds will have the same components. Those components are

• A statement identifying the legal issue to be addressed.

• The rule governing the legal issue and, where needed, an explanation of the relevant authorities or cases supporting that rule.

• An application of the law to the facts of your client’s case.

• A final conclusion or prediction about how a court might rule on …

The Unparalleled Benefits Of Teaching Parallelism, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As a student, I never learned how to use parallel structure, or “parallelism,” as a writing technique. I didn’t even know the official term until I started teaching legal writing. But even if I couldn’t name it, I always knew I liked it. As a high-school history student, I felt its force in speeches like Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream. Parallelism always felt to me like the place where poetry meets prose—where even the most mundane writing can start to sing.

Measuring Selection Bias In Publicly Available Judicial Opinions, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

To have an informed discussion about judicial performance and efficiency, we will sometimes want to explore what judges actually do on an everyday level. But in many ways, courts have not always been paragons of transparency. Often the parties are the only people who are aware of what action a court has taken in a case.

This paper explores that dynamic, in the context of decisions made by federal trial courts at one particular procedural stage--decisions made on motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim--Rule 12(b)(6) motions. There is growing interest in the work of federal trial courts, …

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 …

The Deconstructed Issue-Spotting Exam, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article proposes a teaching technique for use in large, Socratic-style law school classes to embed exam preparation, formative assessment, and lawyering simulations in the course without overburdening the professor or students. This technique is sustainable, yet highly efficacious for students.

Law schools nationwide are implementing new reforms pushing law schools toward stronger assessment techniques and client-based simulations better preparing students for the practice of law. Many law schools have implemented these reforms around the margins or outside of the traditional doctrinal course. Law schools have generally added new classes with experiential learning components or with simulations integrated into the …

Take Inventory Each Year, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

We Carry Each Other, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Social Freedom, Democracy And The Political: Three Reflections On Axel Honneth's Idea Of Socialism, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, James T. Sparrow

Articles

Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political limits of Honneth’s social reconstruction.

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 …