Date of Publication:
Ellen S. Podgor, The Price We All Pay When Corporations Dodge Criminal Charges (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Kirsten K. Davis, Crossing the Threshold with Apples, Potatoes, and Limes: Using the “Grocer’s Dilemma” to Introduce Law Students to Malleability in the Law (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The Grocer’s Dilemma is a legal writing (and thinking) assignment that can help undergraduate students interested in law school as well as first-year law students beginning their legal study better understand how legal rules are not fixed but are instead malleable—uncertain, flexible, and somewhat indeterminate. It asks students to consider, based on a grocer’s preference, where to place produce inside a grocery store. In this process, students must consider “precedents”—other produce—that contribute to the rule. Those precedents, however, do not have a fixed meaning. Instead, their meaning is malleable.
Malleability is a threshold concept in the law. As such, when students become aware of and more comfortable with the concept of malleability, they can begin moving through the liminality of legal education and begin their journey across the threshold between legal novice and lawyer-expert. The Grocer’s Dilemma assignment focuses students on a nonlegal context for examining malleability, making it easier for students to focus on the complexities of reasoning about a malleable rule rather than the legal rules themselves.
Date of Publication:
Kirsten K. Davis, A New Parlor is Open: Legal Writing Faculty Must Develop Scholarship on Generative AI and Writing (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Generative artificial intelligence likely represents a paradigm shift in legal communication teaching, learning, and practice. What we know (so far) about generative AI suggests that law school legal writing courses will need to teach generative AI skills to be used as part of a hybrid human-generative AI legal writing process. Accordingly, legal writing faculty will need to understand how generative AI works, its implications for legal writing practices, and how to teach legal writers the knowledge and skills needed to use generative AI ethically and effectively in their work.
As a community of scholars, legal writing faculty should lead the inquiry into the connections between generative AI and legal writing products, processes, and practices. This is an exciting time; there are many unanswered questions to explore about the relationships between human writers and machine writing tools.
Unlike other essays in the Unending Conversation collection, this essay does not join a conversation. Instead, it is a conversation starter; it is meant to “open the parlor door” and encourage legal writing scholars to research at the intersection of generative AI and legal writing. As legal communication experts, legal writing faculty are well-situated to be frequent and expert speakers in this conversation.
This essay explains why generative AI represents the beginning of a paradigm shift in legal writing that requires scholarly exploration and presents some ideas for the “big issues” that will need investigation.
Date of Publication:
Robin Boyle-Laisure and Brooke J. Bowman, The Beauty of Shorts: Ten Tips on Writing a Publishable Short Piece (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
With twenty years of combined editorial experience, Professors Robin Boyle-Laisure and Brooke J. Bowman share advice on writing a short article of publishable quality for a legal writing journal. The essay provides five advantageous reasons to publish a short piece, as opposed to a much longer article for a traditional legal periodical. Based upon their experience in reviewing countless submissions, the authors provide ten tips from the start to the finish line of getting an article published.
Date of Publication:
Robyn Powell, Supreme Court Unlocks New Path to Relief for Disabled Students (2023)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Em Wright, Embracing Failures and Employing Humility (2022)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Robyn Powell, Justice for Parents with Disabilities and Their Children (2021)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The child welfare system disproportionately harms families headed by parents with disabilities. The only way to achieve justice for these families is to abolish the child welfare system and reimagine methods of providing non-punitive supports and resources. Such efforts must recognize and respond to the needs of parents with disabilities and their children, such as by ensuring economic well-being, investing in accessible supports, ending surveillance of families, and providing high-quality legal representation for those entangled in the system. Most importantly, all legal and policy responses must be led by those most impacted by the current child welfare system, including parents with disabilities. The goal must be to create a world in which the child welfare system is no longer deemed necessary.
Date of Publication:
Robyn Powell, From Carrie Buck to Britney Spears: Strategies for Disrupting the Ongoing Reproductive Oppression of Disabled People (2021)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In June 2021, Britney Spears made news headlines when she testified to a judge that she was being prevented from having children because her conservator would not allow her to stop using contraception. Britney Spears’ dreadful experiences are a glaring reminder that nearly 100 years after the infamous Buck v. Bell decision, reproduction is still weaponized to subjugate people with disabilities. Indeed, the reproductive oppression experienced by Britney Spears and other people with actual or perceived disabilities is deeply entrenched in our laws, in our policies, and in our collective conscience. Confronting these persistent inequities will require us to radically transform our laws and policies. This Essay responds to the ongoing reproductive injustice experienced by disabled people by proposing a vision to assist activists, legal professionals, scholars, and policymakers conceive of and articulate the basic contours of a paradigm shift that supports the coalescence of the reproductive justice and disability justice movements. The guiding principles set forth herein are intended to advance a long-overdue conversation about reproductive justice for people with disabilities by providing a starting point for activists, scholars, legal professionals, and policymakers to use, critique, and improve upon. The need for action could not be more timely or clear.
Date of Publication:
Kirsten K. Davis, A Provisional Definition of Legal Writing Scholarship, in 2University of Oregon Proceedings: Online Journal of Legal Writing Conference Presentations (2021)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
James W. Fox, Fellow Citizens (2021)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article explores the idea of equal citizenship central to the reconstructed Constitution that originated in the crucible of African American experience and framed by the Black abolitionist movement of the antebellum North. It identifies some of the key concepts of this mid-nineteenth-century African American Constitutionalism embodied in the phrase used at the time of “Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate.” These became the core principles of Black Reconstruction as Black leaders and their white allies sought to secure civil freedom, free labor, equal suffrage and political power, and access to education and economic and social advancement. The essay addresses primary source materials that exemplify a dynamic and vibrant public discourse by African Americans on the nature and meaning of equal citizenship before ratification of the Reconstruction amendments, and then briefly consider congressional speeches on what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It shows that the rights embodied in the three Reconstruction amendments were seen not as discrete texts for judicial parsing and doctrinal boundary-drawing, but as an interrelated set of core principles essential to the very ideas of freedom and equal citizenship, ideals that were meant to motivate and guide political and economic action