This is the second, and still profoundly drafty, version of the legal-writing textbook that I premiered last year. You can read all about it in last year’s blog post. I welcome your feedback. I’m really hoping to have all the chapters finished before next year’s edition. Here it is: https://rhetoricked.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Legal-Argumentation-fall-2021-ver.-FINAL.pdf
The Texas A&M School of Public Health and the Population Informatics Lab is looking to hire a law student as a research assistant for research relating to privacy, big data, ethics, and legal data protections. The research assistant will be involved in all aspects of the research process, including: Research design, implementation, and analysis. Research… Continue reading RA posting: Privacy, big data, ethics, and legal data protections
For the last couple years, the Outreach Committee of the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research has been providing a “Dance Card,” a list of sessions at the AALS annual meeting that we think section members will find interesting. The Dance Card for the 2021 AALS annual meeting is now available.
This semester, I’ve tried a new assignment: I asked each student in my two sections to post two musical selections on a Google Forms survey. They received completion points for doing so. The resulting list (along with four selections I added myself) appears on Spotify. My instructions to them indicated only that I wanted the… Continue reading Layers and small-talk: A playlist exercise
To skip the BS and go straight to the download, click here: https://www.rhetoricked.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Legal-Argumentation-fall-2020-ed.-FINAL.pdf OK, who needs another legal writing textbook? Absolutely no one, except me. I love Chris Coughlin, Joan Rocklin, and Sandy Patrick’s A Lawyer Writes (3d ed.), but it does not do some things exactly how I want them done, and it does not… Continue reading Legal Argumentation (2021 ed., fall 2020 version)
Updated June 19, 2020, to include link to video of second Zoom session and bibliographic essay; May 29, 2020, to indicate time of June 9 meeting After the wonderful demo that Professor Tracy Norton (Touro Law) provided of online peer-review tool Peerceptiv in early May, I thought it would be helpful for teachers of legal… Continue reading Demo of online peer-review tool Eli Review
This post provides the presentation slides and my notes from a talk at the University of Wisconsin Law School on March 4, 2020. To download the PDF, click this link.
I posted a new article on SSRN this week that presents the big-picture findings of an empirical study I’ve been doing of the argumentative practices of judges and advocates in 199 textual artifacts. (Page numbers here are for the version posted on SSRN on Feb. 18, 2020.) I’ve done the analysis (with the help of… Continue reading What are ‘case uses’ and how do I read box plots?
Each fall in my Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing class, I split students into teams, each comprising four or five students, and have them compete to prepare citations that are correct according to the Bluebook (or the ALWD Guide, depending on your proclivities–I check to be sure they are consistent). They compete in relay races,… Continue reading The Citation Cup: Fall 2019
(Lightly edited March 21, 2022, to correct mechanical errors; featured image “Love Kitty” Copyright 2013 Mark McNestry CC license) by Brian N. Larson & Olivia J. Countryman There has been a great deal of conversation in recent months and years about the appropriate pronouns to use when referring to folks. Merriam-Webster in 2019 added the… Continue reading What’s your pronoun? Contemporary gender issues in legal communication
