RA posting: Privacy, big data, ethics, and legal data protections
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 ethics compliance Drafting manuscripts for publication in academic journals The position requires strong writing ability. Familiarity with information technology, privacy law, and ethics are preferred. Interested applicants should email a cover letter, law school transcripts, and writing sample (optional) to schmit@tamu.edu. 1L, 2L, and 3L Read More …
LWRR AALS “Dance Card” now available
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.
Layers and small-talk: A playlist exercise
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 songs for my playlist for commuting between Dallas (where I live) and Fort Worth (where I teach) and that I had a pedagogical purpose that I would reveal later. Only one student reached out to me to ask whether they would be publicly identified with Read More …
Legal Argumentation (2021 ed., fall 2020 version)
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 do some other things at all. As textbooks go, it’s not expensive, but it is another $50-60 out of students’ pockets. And I would prefer students to have an electronic text, simply because it means fewer books to carry around (though they may very well Read More …
Demo of online peer-review tool Eli Review
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 communication to see a demo of another tool, Eli Review, that I’ve used with first-year law students for the last three years at Texas A&M University. (Videos of the Zooms Professor Norton held before and after the demo are available here and here.) The Peerceptiv Read More …
Precedent and Rational Persuasion: An Empirical Study
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.
What are ‘case uses’ and how do I read box plots?
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 a dozen research assistants) over the last two years, and the findings raise some interesting questions. But before we can really talk about the findings, you need to know what it is we were looking for, the ‘case use.’ And because I presented many of Read More …
The Citation Cup: Fall 2019
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, two teams at a time, weekly during the semester. In the last couple weeks of the semester, we have playoffs and crown each section’s winning team. Well… we do not exactly crown them. Instead, they get their names engraved on the coveted “Citation Cup,” pictured Read More …
What’s your pronoun? Contemporary gender issues in legal communication
(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 singular-pronoun function to its definition of `they.’[1] The question of pronoun use arises most frequently in the context of transgender and gender non-binary persons. Chances are, if you are of a certain age, much of this sounds a bit confusing: You are perhaps too old Read More …
The Life of the Law is Dialogic
This is the presentation that Professor Susan Provenzano of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and I are giving on Friday, September 27, 2019, at the UNLV symposium on Classical Rhetoric as a Lens for Contemporary Legal Praxis. Download link: https://www.rhetoricked.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/190927-SEP-BNL-preso.pdf