Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Words, Wolves, And Show Dogs, Zachary Schmook

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Architecture Of Drama: How Lawyers Can Use Screenwriting Techniques To Tell More Compelling Stories, Teresa M. Bruce

Publications

Hollywood writers have a secret. They know how to tell a compelling story—so compelling that the top-grossing motion pictures rake in millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars. How do they do it? They use a simple formula involving three acts that propel the story forward, three "plot points" that focus on the protagonist, and two "pinch points" that focus on the adversary. The attached Article argues that lawyers should build their stories in the same way Hollywood writers do. It deconstructs the storytelling formula used in movies and translates it into an IRAC-like acronym, SCOR. Attorneys who use SCOR will …

A Reconsideration Of Copyright's Term, Kristelia A. García, Justin Mccrary

Publications

For well over a century, legislators, courts, lawyers, and scholars have spent significant time and energy debating the optimal duration of copyright protection. While there is general consensus that copyright’s term is of legal and economic significance, arguments both for and against a lengthy term are often impressionistic. Utilizing music industry sales data not previously available for academic analysis, this Article fills an important evidentiary gap in the literature. Using recorded music as a case study, we determine that most copyrighted music earns the majority of its lifetime revenue in the first five to ten years following its initial release …

We Carry Each Other, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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 …

Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell

Reviews

No abstract provided.

Justice Kennedy's Prose – Style And Substance, Eric Segall, Eric Berger, Michael C. Dorf, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement in June 2018 sent shockwaves throughout America. After Justice Sandra Day O'Connor left the Court in 2005, Justice Kennedy became the Court's all-important swing vote in virtually every important area of constitutional law. His views on affirmative action, abortion, campaign finance reform, free speech, and the separation of church and state (among many other constitutional issues) were the ones that mattered the most among the Justices. Lawyers prepared arguments and filed briefs in the Supreme Court for the main purpose of persuading Justice Kennedy to rule for their clients. He was, quite simply, the …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Four Recommendations, Jed S. Rakoff, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

In an age of mass incarceration, it is not so easy to find good in the U.S. criminal justice system. But The Secret Barrister makes you appreciate the better aspects of our system by showing just how dysfunctional the corresponding English system has become. The book — written by an anonymous junior barrister — is a devastating, sometimes hilarious, and frequently heart-breaking account of how the criminal justice system in England and Wales is not only broke financially but broken in its ability to deliver justice, whether to prosecutors, defendants, victims, or the public.

Strengthening The International Clinical Scholarly Community: Opportunities For The Clinical Law Review And Beyond, Leah Wortham

Scholarly Articles

In its first 25 years, the Clinical Law Review (CLR) provided a ground-breaking foundation to build a scholarly field inspired and informed by clinical work and to legitimate that scholarship within the academy. The CLR broadened the window for clinicians to put their work in a wider context of other clinicians' experience, and with that context and comparison, to build theory from this common body of endeavor.

As Part I describes, 12 of the CLR's 404 works in its 25-year history include voices from outside the United States. While some countries' clinical education history is as old, or older, than …

Justice Kennedy And The First Amendment, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews some of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most significant contributions to First Amendment jurisprudence. These include his calls for absolute protection for pure political speech, his strong protection for commercial speech, his distaste for campaign finance reform laws that censored speech, his general concern for the silencing of sexual expression, his coercion test in Establishment Clause cases, and his significant failure in the public-employee free-speech decision Garcetti v. Ceballos.

The Content-Discrimination Principle And The Impact Of Reed V. Town Of Gilbert, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

The content-discrimination principle remains the chief analytical tool used in First Amendment jurisprudence. Under this doctrine, laws are categorized as content-based or content-neutral. Content-based laws are subject to strict scrutiny and content-neutral ones are subject to intermediate scrutiny.

The U.S. Supreme Court ratcheted up the content-discrimination principle in Reed v. Town of Gilbert. Previously, lower courts were divided on whether a law was content-based if the underlying purpose was not to engage in censorship or content-discrimination. In Reed, however, the Court declared that the law’s purpose is not the central inquiry. It concluded that if a law draws facial distinctions …

Masthead

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fake News, Alternative Facts, And Disinformation: The Importance Of Teaching Media Literacy To Law Students, Marin Dell

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Masthead

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Exemplary Legal Writing 2018: Five Recommendations, Femi Cadmus, Casandra Laskowski

Faculty Scholarship

A brief review of five recommended exemplary legal books published in 2018.

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.

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

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

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.