370 research outputs found
Conserving the canvas: reducing the environmental footprint of legal briefs by re-imagining court rules and document design strategies
No full textThis article advances an important argument as to why we should be redesigning our lawyering documents. Not only is readability an important issue but so is the environmental footprint of our document design choices. So here is the bottom line advice that I offer today - judges and attorneys can easily cut down on the environmental impact that our documents have by making three easy and simultaneous changes to court rules and practices: 1. allow and encourage or even require double-sided printing; 2. move to 1.5 line spacing rather than double spacing; and 3. adopt court rules that limit documents by word counts while simultaneously eliminating font and font-size requirements.
These recommendations do not involve going paperless. Eliminating all paper filing is certainly the best thing that we could do for the environment but is probably not completely realistic at this point in time. Moreover, even in those jurisdictions where attorneys submit documents by electronic filing, hard copies are nevertheless being printed by those people who have to read them. Computer screen reading is just not feasible yet for long documents so it does not behoove us to ask people to completely buy into paperless everything. Until we can all afford and are ready to use personal document readers, we will realistically still have a world where we prefer to read longer documents in hard copy. For that reason, this article will make its conservation recommendations based on the somewhat more temperate concept of sustainability.Peer reviewed
[Review of] Story craft: the complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction, by Jack Hart
No full textHarry Potter, Ruby Slippers, and Merlin: telling the client's story using the characters and paradigm of the archetypal hero's journey
No full textThis article focuses on the relationship of mythology and folklore heroes to everyday lawyering decisions regarding case theory when the audience is a judge or panel of judges rather than a jury. It proposes the thesis that because people respond - instinctively and intuitively - to certain recurring story patterns and character archetypes, lawyers should systematically and deliberately integrate into their storytelling the larger picture of their clients' goals by subtly portraying their individual clients as heroes on a particular life path. This strategy is not merely a device to make the story more interesting but provides a scaffold to influence the judge at the unconscious level by providing a metaphor for universal themes of struggle and growth
Painting With Print: Incorporating concepts of typographic and layout design into the text of legal writing documents
No full textThis article seeks to help attorneys do good deeds for their readers by using the look of the words themselves to create a visually effective textual "picture" in lawyering documents. The arguments and suggestions for better textual visuals are not opinion but are grounded in science. The article examines interdisciplinary research and also looks at accepted practices in graphic design. The research helps explain that principles of document design should not be considered "optional" or rejected as merely subjective speculation. In fact, most of the accepted principles of document design are grounded in scientific study. The article also includes an appendix charting the format rules of the state and federal appellate courts,along with the answer to whether an attorney can employ the synthesized design techniques in a particular jurisdiction. Includes a large appendix of court rules at the time of publication.From 2004-2016 this article appeared, by invitation, on the website homepage of the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.Peer reviewed
Three 3Ls, Kairos, and the Civil Right to Counsel in Domestic Violence Cases
No full textWritten as part of the Michigan State University Law Review's Persuasion in Civil Rights Advocacy symposium, this is the story of three clinic students and the mark they made on New Jersey law. Really, it is a story about students trying to seize kairos, the opportune moment in time to effectuate change. Seeing an opportune moment in time to call attention to a legal issue they identified as important, the three third-year law students in this story wrote, as amici curiae, a brief in support of a petition for certification to the New Jersey Supreme Court on the issue of whether indigent litigants in civil domestic violence cases have the right to court-appointed attorneys. These students and their professors believed the timing was right to argue that indigent litigants involved in the New Jersey domestic violence restraining order process have a legal right to court-appointed counsel as a requirement of equal access to a fair trial. The issue had been briefly raised several years earlier. However, the right to counsel issue had been completely disregarded by the courts, and no state-based advocacy groups pursued the issue. These students, in contrast, saw something to the issue that other advocates had missed. Moreover, they saw it at the right time in their own legal education to act on it, compellingly. The article offers a rhetorical analysis of what they wrote, what happened, and the impact on advocacy in New Jersey domestic violence law
An Introduction to This Volume and to Applied Legal Storytelling
No full textThis article introduces the reader to the idea of "Applied Legal Storytelling," and differentiates it from law and literature. The goal of applied legal storytelling, through conferences and the resulting lawyering (clinic, legal writing, and skills) scholarship, is to create a rich and accessible dialogue about the how, when and why of stories and storytelling in legal practice. The conferences support professors create a foundation for future lawyers by teaching story and storytelling as part of a primary pedagogy. The scholarship promotes legal practice as well as legal education. Behind the idea is the simple truth that stories are essential ingredients in human interaction and a primary form of communication. An audience responds to stories in one of three ways: response-shaping, response-reinforcing, or response-changing. Thus, stories are cognitive instruments as well as a means of argumentation in and of themselves.Since the initial conference in 2007, the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference has grown to become a biennial event. A bibliography published in 2015 listed 90+ works published in this emerging discipline.Peer reviewed
Art-iculating the analysis: systemizing the decision to use visuals as legal reasoning
No full textThis article first assumes that visuals belong and are ethically permitted in legal documents -- something explored by other authors -- and then begins to answer the questions of effective application. The article explores the specific use of analytical visuals, which are those that do not attempt to prove what happened in a legal dispute but rather help explain how the dispute should be resolved under the legal standards. Thus, the included analytical visual, when used effectively, creates a stronger understanding of the abstract legal analysis. The article suggests a taxonomy for categories of analytical visuals. It also acknowledges that many visuals are created for the attorney's own understanding and provides a rubric for attorneys to use when deciding whether to include visuals in the submitted advocacy document.Peer reviewed
Beyond #TheNew10--The Case for a Citizens Currency Advisory Committee
No full textOn April 20, 2016, ten months after promising to place a woman’s portrait on the 20 bill
'The cracked mirror': Anne Sexton's poetics of self-representation
No full textThis thesis re-evaluates the work of the poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), concentrating, in particular, on the indeterminacies, contradictions and aporia which it finds to be characteristic of her ostensibly frank and self-revelatory writing. The study is based on a close textual
analysis of Sexton's writing, is informed by oststructuralist theories, and is sustained by an
examination and discussion of archive collections of her previously unpublished papers. In seeking an understanding of Sexton's poetics, the thesis identifies and interrogates the strategies of denial and obfuscation apparent in her own explication of her work - principally, by scrutiny of the unpublished, and previously unresearched, drafts of a series of lectures
which she delivered in 1972. Chapters One and Two consider the origins of `confessional' or - Sexton's preferred term - 'personal' poetry and reassess her place within contemporary poetry. They suggest that
Sexton's writing is engaged in a process of negotiation and contestation, both with the boundaries and expectations of confessionalism, and with the strictures of T. S. Eliot's theory of `impersonality'. In support of these arguments, Chapter Two offer a reading of Sexton's
little-known poem, `Hurry Up Please It's Time', alongside its intertext, Eliot's The Waste Land. Chapter Three reassesses received views of the supposedly beneficial interrelationship between confessional speaker and reader. It examines Sexton's appropriation of dramatic
masks and personae and her use of metaphors of striptease and prostitution, and suggests that these are employed simultaneously to appease and to repel an intrusive audience. Similarly, Chapters Four and Five trace Sexton's problematisation of two previously-accepted tenets of confessional poetry: its status as autobiography and its truthfulness, drawing attention to the techniques employed in order to give the impression of both. Chapter Six considers Sexton's
problematic engagement with a language which is not malleable, transparent, and referential but, rather, is experienced as uncooperative and occlusive. Finally, the thesis recuperates Sexton from the common charge of narcissism, arguing that it is the writing, rather than the poet, which is self-reflexive and self-conscious. In this respect, it concludes that her work - perhaps unexpectedly - anticipates many of the tendencies of postmodernist writing
A sojourn in Paris 1824-25: sex and sociability in the manuscript writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840)
No full textThis thesis examines the day to day practices that constituted Anne Lister's (1791-1840) sexuality and sociability within the range of her writings, as well as her society. Anne's writings were a detailed account, spanning her lifetime, of her own love and relationships with the 'fairer sex' (Whitbread 1988, 145). Anne's sociality, seen in her correspondence and plain handwritten journal entries, has been explored by Muriel Green in Miss Lister of Shibden Hall and Jill Liddington in Female Fortune and Nature's Domain (Green 1992; Liddington 1998; 2003). As a gentlewoman of adequate means, Anne has garnered some attention from women's historians interested in her agency within an early nineteenth century social and historical context. Anne's sexual identity has been extensively analysed over the past nearly twenty years by lesbian feminists, queer theorists, women's historians and historians of sexuality concerned with the history and development of modern Western female homosexuality and gender. The source for theorising Anne's sexuality has been the edited selections of the crypted journal entries, published by Helena Whitbread in I Know My Own Heart and No Priest but Love (Whitbread 1988; 1992). However, many analyses deal either with the theorisation of Anne's sexuality or her sociality; the theoretical difficulty with reconciling these categories has troubled the analysis of her complex subjectivity. Drawing upon the archival materials, I have used an interdisciplinary feminist approach to analyse the sexual and social processes of Anne's everyday interactions in her writings. Taking the seven month period of the sojourn to Paris in 1824-25, I have focused upon Anne's textual practices within her journal volume and letters during her residence in Paris, her social practices with the other guests at the guesthouse 24 Place Vendome and her sexual practices with her lover, the widow Mrs. Maria Barlow. The journal volumes and correspondence are a valuable historical record of one gentlewoman's engagement with early nineteenth century British culture
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