8,728 research outputs found
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
Harry 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
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
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
[Review of] Story craft: the complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction, by Jack Hart
No full textArt-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
Profile of Rhea Cote Robbins, a native of Waterville and author of Wednesday\u27s
No full textProfile of Rhea Cote Robbins, a native of Waterville and author of Wednesday\u27s Child. Robbins is winner of the 1997 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Contest for Non-fiction, and is currently co-editing an anthology of Franco-American women\u27s writing
Psychological type profile of Methodist circuit ministers in Britain : similarities to and differences from Anglican clergy
No full textPsychological type theory is employed to profile similarities and differences between Methodist ministers in Britain and the Church of England clergy profiled in an earlier study by Francis, Craig, Whinney, Tilley and Slater (2007). New data were provided by 693 male and 311 female Methodist ministers who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales. These data demonstrated that both male and female Methodist ministers were less likely to prefer intuition, and more likely to prefer sensing, compared to their Anglican colleagues. Also, male Methodist ministers were more likely to prefer feeling and less likely to prefer thinking in comparison with their Anglican colleagues. In other respects, the Methodist ministers and the Anglican clergy recorded similar profiles. These findings are interpreted to illuminate characteristics of strength and weakness in Methodist and Anglican ministry in England and to highlight potential challenges in effecting cooperation between the two denominations
- …
