The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, co-sponsored by the law schools at Washburn University and Gonzaga University, invites proposals for conference workshops on the benefits of variety in all aspects of teaching and learning. This conference will take place at Gonzaga University on June 25, 2012.
Proposals must be submitted by February 1, 2012 via email to Barb Anderson, Program Coordinator, Institute for Law Teaching and Learning at banderson2[at]lawschool.gonzaga.edu.
ae
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on January 18th, 2012
| Legal Research & Writing, CONFERENCES |
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The 7th Joint Study Institute (JSI) will be held at Melbourne Law School from Wednesday evening, February 13 to Saturday, February 16, 2013.
Joint Study Institutes are hosted by the
JSI programs provide unique opportunities to network and learn about the law, legal research and topical issues of the host jurisdiction that are of interest to law librarians and the legal profession. The last JSI held in Australia was held in Sydney in 2004. For information about past Joint Study Institute programs, see this page.
Watch for announcements in 2012 about the next JSI program. We look forward to welcoming you to enjoy a stimulating educational program and Melbourne’s diverse cultural, culinary, historical and bibliographic attractions.
Regards,
2013 JSI Co-convenors,
Carole Hinchcliff, Melbourne Law School Library
Robin Gardner, Melbourne Law School Library
Vanessa Blackmore, NSW Attorney General’s Department
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on December 27th, 2011
| Legal Profession, Law Librarianship, Comparative Law, Legal Research & Writing, CONFERENCES |
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The National Law University, Delhi, SAARC Law, and Mohan Law House will be hosting a conference on “Access to Legal Information & Research in the Digital Age” from Feb. 29 to March 2, 2012. Submission of abstracts began Dec. 1, 2011 and notification of acceptance will be on Jan. 1, 2012. The papers may be submitted online to Priya Rai, (Conference Convener) at icalirda2012[at]gmail.com.
nh
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on December 15th, 2011
| Legal Research & Writing, CALLS FOR PAPERS, CONFERENCES |
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The AALL Research & Publications Committee is accepting applications through Monday, December 12, 2011, for research grants from the AALL/Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Grants Program that may total up to $5000. Details here.
The committee will award one or more grants to library professionals who wish to conduct research that supports the research/scholarly agenda of the profession of librarianship. The grants program funds small or large research projects that create, disseminate, or otherwise use legal and law-related information as its focus. Projects may range from the historical (indexes, legislative histories, bibliographies, biographies, or directories) to the theoretical (trends in cataloging, publishing, or new service models in libraries) to the practical (implementation models for collection, personnel, or infrastructure management).The AALL Research Agenda offers suggestions for possible research projects that cover a wide segment of professional interest, including the profession of law librarianship, law library patrons, law library services, legal research and bibliography, legal information resources, and law library facilities. However, projects are not limited to those described in the agenda, and the committee will consider all applications and research projects.
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on November 30th, 2011
| OTHER SCHOLARLY OPPORTUNITIES, Law Librarianship, Legal Research & Writing |
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The University at Buffalo Law School will host the Third Annual Empire State Legal Writing Conference on June 23, 2012 in Buffalo New York. The conference invites proposals for presentations on a broad range of topics relevant to those who teach legal writing and research. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 12, 2012. Email prospals to Stephen Paskey at sjpaskey[at]buffalo.edu with a copy to empirestatelw[at]gmail.com.
nh
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on November 27th, 2011
| Legal Research & Writing, CALLS FOR PAPERS, Legal Education, CONFERENCES |
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On some Fridays, we highlight scholarship, news, and blog posts about scholarship. If you would like to recommend something for this feature, please send us a note (legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com).
- This week (Oct. 24-30) has been Open Access Week, “A global event, now in its 5th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.”
- For access to thousands of open access journals from around the world, see Directory of Open Access Journals. Click here for Law and Political Science.
- Richard A. Danner (Duke) recently posted Open Access to Legal Scholarship: Dropping the Barriers to Discourse and Dialogue (October 14, 2011). J. Int’l Com. L. & Tech., Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1945228
This article focuses on the importance of free and open access to legal scholarship and commentary on the law. It argues that full understanding of authoritative legal texts requires access to informed commentary as well as to the texts of the law themselves, and that free and open access to legal commentary will facilitate cross-border dialogue and foster international discourse in law. The paper discusses the obligations of scholars and publishers of legal commentary to make their work as widely accessible as possible. Examples of institutional and disciplinary repositories for legal scholarship are presented, as are the possible impacts of such initiatives as the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship.
- Limor Peer, Building an Open Data Repository: Lessons and Challenges (September 15, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1931048
The Internet has transformed scholarly research in many ways. Open access to data and other research output has been touted as a crucial step toward transparency and quality in science. This paper takes a critical look at what it takes to share social science research data, from the perspective of a small data repository at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. The ISPS Data Archive was built to create an open access digital collection of social science experimental data, metadata, and associated files produced by ISPS researchers, for the purpose of replication of research findings, further analysis, and teaching. This paper describes the development of the ISPS Data Archive and discusses the inter-related challenges of replication, integration, and stewardship. It argues that open data requires effort, investment of resources, and planning. By itself, it does not enhance knowledge.
- Jennifer Howard, Princeton U. Adopts Open-Access Policy, Chron. Higher Educ., Sept. 29, 2011
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on October 28th, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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The UCLA Empirical Legal Scholars Association will be hosting the 1st Annual Western Empirical Legal Studies Conference on February 18, 2012. The WELS conference is open to law and graduate students, and provides them with a forum to present their empirical legal research. Abstract submissions are due October 21, 2011.
Hat Tip: Empirical Legal Studies
mf
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on September 29th, 2011
| Legal Research & Writing, CONFERENCES |
no comments
The New England Consortium of Legal Writing Teachers seeks proposals for presentations at the Creating Practice-Ready Assignments and Exercises Legal Writing Conference. The conference aims to provide attendees with new ideas and material that can be used in the classroom. The deadline for proposals is November 1, 2011. The conference will be held on December 16, 2011 at UNH School of Law, Concord, NH.
Hat Tip: Faculty Awareness Blog mf
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on September 29th, 2011
| Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education, CONFERENCES |
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Chris Beneke offers advice to academic book reviewers: Thou Shalt Review Books Responsibly, The Historical Society, July 29, 2011.
Colin Miller asks: Burying the Lead?: Does a C.V. Listing “Lead Article” Status Make You Think More Favorably, Less Favorably, or No Differently About a Person?, PrawfsBlawg, Sept. 2, 2011. The consensus of Prof. Miller and the people who posted comments is unfavorable to the practice. Being the lead article often indicates nothing. And bragging about it seems, well, unseemly.
Bryan A. Garner presents his annual list of law journal bloopers and suggests a reform:
Of all the editorial reforms that a law review might adopt, the most beneficial would be to require line editors to justify their edits with brief notations citing usage guides. This policy would eliminate nearly all edits that introduce errors into manuscripts . . . .
Bryan A. Garner, Reforming the Law Reviews, Stud. Law., May 2011, at 18.
Two scholars analyze the early publishing careers of economists:
Michael J. Hilmer & Chritiana E. Hilmer, Is It Where You Go or Who You Know? On the Relationship Between Students, Ph.D. Program Quality, Dissertation Advisor Prominence, and Early Career Publishing Success, 30 Econ. Educ. Rev. 991 (2011)
Abstract: Previous research finds that both Ph.D. program quality and relative dissertation advisor prominence are positively related to early-career publishing success. We provide insight into the relative importance of those factors by estimating early-career research productivity functions that: (1) allow relative dissertation advisor prominence to vary while holding Ph.D. program quality constant and (2) allow Ph.D. program quality to vary while holding relative dissertation advisor prominence constant. Results for a sample of 2983 economics Ph.D. recipients suggest that: (1) the estimated marginal effects of relative dissertation advisor prominence do not vary systematically within top Ph.D. programs and (2) students graduating from a program-switching advisor’’s higher-ranked program publish significantly more than those graduating from his or her lower-ranked program. Combined, these results might suggest that the observed correlation between dissertation advisor prominence and early-career publishing results more from students working with prominent advisors possessing the higher innate potential required to gain admission to top programs rather than strictly because they work with the more prominent advisor.
A professor of creative writing muses about scholars who say they’ve been told that they write too well. What’s really going on? Different possibilities include that the piece is overwritten or it is written well but the analysis or research are inadequate. Rachel Toor, The Problem Is: You Write to Well, Chron. Higher Educ., Sept. 6, 2011.
[I]f someone ever tells you that you write too well, ask him for an explanation and be prepared to hear something that will cause you to do more work.
We welcome suggestions of articles or blog posts to list in Friday’s Scholarship About Scholarship. Send a note to legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com. mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on September 23rd, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing |
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This installment of Friday’s Scholarship About Scholarship might more aptly be labelled “Blog Posts About Scholarship,” but I’ll still with the meta label. To suggest something for this (nearly) weekly post, send a note to legalscholarshipblog[at]gmail.com
Do you tend to assume that everything you need is on your favorite online system? A law librarian at the University of Toronto looked at which Canadian law journals were available on Lexis, Westlaw, or HeinOnline. Fewer than half of the journals were available on two or more of the platforms. See John Papadopoulos, Canadian Law Journals on Commercial Databases, SLAW, Aug. 17, 2011.
Eugene Volokh explores what makes a good article title by analyzing Twombly Is the Logical Extension of the Mathews v. Eldridge Test to Discovery. Eugene Volokh, An Enlightening Law Review Article Title, Volokh Conspiracy, Aug. 24, 2011.
Legal History Blog interviewed Lawrence Friedman on scholarship:
Ilya Somin discusses How Lawprofs Outside the Top 15 Schools Can Still Have a Big Impact on their Fields, The Volokh Conspiracy, Sept. 12, 2011.
Colin Miller ponders Old Question: How Do You “Rank” a Specialty Journal? New Question: How Do You Rank an Online Law Review?, PrawfsBlawg, Sept. 8, 2011.
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on September 16th, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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Anis Shivani, Exclusive Interview with Princeton University Press Director Peter Dougherty, Huffington Post, Aug. 28, 2011 (the first of a projected series of interview with university press leaders). See also this piece from a year ago: Anis Shivani, The 17 Most Innovative University Presses and the Books You Will Want from Them, Huffington Post, Aug. 21, 2010.
Karen L. Wallace & M. Sara Lowe, HeinOnline and Law Review Citation Patterns (February 11, 2011). Law Library Journal, Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 55-70, Winter 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1883596
The authors tested the proposition that the ubiquity of HeinOnline in law libraries would alter law review citation patterns. Has HeinOnline’s provision of the full runs of law reviews in full text led to more citations to older materials? This article reports the results of the study they undertook to test this theory.
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on September 2nd, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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This week’s Scholarship About Scholarship includes papers on copyright of academic works, law and economics in law schools, publication patterns in economics, law reviews’ ideologically-driven publication of pieces about treatment of sexual minority youth, and gendered construction of scientific excellence.
Jump to full post
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 26th, 2011
| Legal Profession, ***, Legal Research & Writing |
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Once a week, we share links to recent papers and blog posts discussing scholarship: how it’s created, how it’s disseminated, who uses it, and so on. To suggest something for this feature, send us a note: legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com. Jump to full post
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 19th, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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Cardozo Law School, the New York Law School Law Review, and the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School present Visualizing Law in the Digital Age Oct. 19, 2011 (at Cardozo) and Oct. 20 Oct. 21, 2011 (at NYLS) (date corrected Sept. 8, 2011). Panels are:
- “Migration, Law, and the Image: Beyond the Veil of Ignorance”
- “Legal Pornology”
- “Visualizing Legal Scholarship”
- “Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque”
- “Visual Literacy for Lawyers.”
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 14th, 2011
| Legal Profession, Law and Philosophy, Law and Humanities, Legal Research & Writing, CONFERENCES |
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On September 1, 2011, the Climenko Fellowship Program will begin accepting applications for the 2012-14 term. Climenko Fellows teach in Harvard Law School’s First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program. The Fellows are aspiring legal academics who receive extensive support and mentoring for their scholarship while teaching legal research and writing. Former Fellows have gone on to tenure-track positions at Arizona State, Boston University, Florida State, Fordham, Georgetown, the University of Minnesota, and Vanderbilt, among other schools. If you are planning a career in legal academia, please consider applying for the fellowship. To apply, send a resume, law school transcript, two or three letters of recommendation, a research agenda and at least one scholarly writing sample to: Susannah Barton Tobin, Director, First-Year Legal Research & Writing Program, Harvard Law School, Griswold 1 North, Cambridge, MA 02138.
mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 13th, 2011
| OTHER SCHOLARLY OPPORTUNITIES, JUNIOR SCHOLARS, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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At Concurring Opinions, a guest blogger who just finished his term as articles editor for the University of Chicago Law Review invites readers to ask him the editors’ perspective on the law review submissions process. David Schraub, Ask an Articles Editor!, Concurring Opinions, Aug. 5, 2011. Topics raised so far:
- the timing of submissions and acceptances
- the openness of journals to submissions by students from other schools
- the handling of requests to expedite review
- the reasons for running a symposium
- whether the review is pressured to accept articles from its own school’s faculty
- advice about cover letters
- how editors view papers posted on SSRN
- the odds of acceptance once a paper has made it to editorial board review
Prof. Schraub will be writing posts in response to these questions next week. mw
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 12th, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
no comments
The Supreme Court and Legal Scholarship
Petherbridge, Lee and Schwartz, David L., An Empirical Assessment of the Supreme Court’s Use of Legal Scholarship (July 12, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1884462
Derogating legal scholarship has become something of a sport for leading figures in the federal judiciary. Perhaps the chief antagonist in recent years has been none other than the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr. His most recent salvo includes the claim that because law review articles are not of interest to the bench, he has trouble remembering the last law review article he read. This claim, and others by the Chief Justice, may represent the end of an uneasy détente concerning the topic of the utility of legal scholarship to the bench and bar. At a minimum, Justice Roberts’s recent comments represent a vigorous invitation to a discussion, which this article accepts. To that discussion we contribute an empirical study that is based on an original and unprecedented body of data derived from every Supreme Court decision over the last sixty-one years. This article presents several surprising results and makes two major novel contributions. The first is evidence describing the amount and patterns of the Supreme Court’s use of legal scholarship over the last sixty-one years. The second, and perhaps most striking contribution of this article, is empirical evidence on the nature and quality of the Court’s use of scholarship. This article provides the first report, as far as we can determine, of evidence that the Supreme Court not only often uses legal scholarship, it also disproportionately uses scholarship when cases are either more important or more difficult to decide. It thus presents results strongly counterintuitive to claims that scholarship is useless or irrelevant to judges and practitioners. The article also discusses areas for future work.
Kenneth Jost, the Supreme Court editor of CQ Press, blogs: Roberts’ Ill-Informed Attack on Legal Scholarship, Jost on Justice, July 19, 2011.
Jonathan H. Adler writes a post and others comment: Chief Justice Roberts and Current Legal Scholarship, Volokh Conspiracy, July 23, 2011.
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 12th, 2011
| Courts, ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
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Elizabeth Mertz, Frances Tung, Katherine Barnes, Wamucii Njogu, Molly Heiler, Joanne Martin, After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the United States (American Bar Foundation 2011)
The After Tenure Study, jointly funded by the ABF and LSAC, is the first in-depth examination of the lives of post-tenure law professors in the United States. It combines a national survey of post-tenure law professors in the U.S. (undertaken in 2005-2006) with a set of follow-up interviews (conducted with a subset of the survey respondents in 2007-2008). A total of 1175 professors responded to the initial survey; their responses provide the basis of this Project Report, which contains descriptive statistics from our first quantitative analyses. Future reports and articles will provide further quantitative and qualitative results.
p. 9.
In addition to their teaching and research duties, tenured law professors also reported devoting time to advancing their careers. Over one-third of our sample “often” attended professional conferences and communicated with colleagues in their field. About 36% of the law professors in our survey reported that they “often” send out reprints, usually to a selected network rather than to a broad mailing list. Some professors said they gave talks at other schools.
p. 28
The Faculty Lounge is having a conversation about Establishing A Writing Regimen, July 27, 2011.
Jeff Lipshaw, Law Review Submission for Satisficers: A Summer Placement Narrative, PrawfsBlawg, July 29, 2011.
This is a narrative about submitting and placing a traditional law review article in a general student-edited law review over the summer, a process I just completed this morning. With some hesitance about giving TMI on how the sausage gets made, I post it as a contribution to the available data about the process.
Eugene Volokh and others comment on Humor in Legal Writing, July 21, 2011.
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on August 5th, 2011
| ***, Legal Research & Writing, Legal Education |
no comments
