The five professors who teach Legal Drafting at the University Of Florida Levin College Of Law meet weekly to collaborate with each other. We also set aside two or three class sessions every semester to experiment with new and innovative teaching ideas. This semester I used that time to introduce ...
IRAC is an acronym for Issue, Rule, Application and Conclusion. I imagine every law school in America teaches its students to use some variation of IRAC as the structure for analyzing a legal issue. And IRAC works fine if the analysis is simple, like this: Issue The issue in this case is ...
When I first started teaching legal research I divided the topic into “paper research” and “computer research.” I covered the digest, the court reporters, statutes and regulations, all in paper form at the library. Then I went on line and showed the students how to use Westlaw and Lexis. A ...
Every first year law student is taught citations, most using the infamous 565 page “Blue Book.” I doubt anyone covers the whole book. Still, my impression is that most professors, including me, teach far more than most students will ever use. And there are times when I think that strategy ...
A lawyer’s writing skills (or lack thereof) can have a direct—even severe—impact on clients’ interests. Did an employer owe a former employee a $7.5 million commission? The court’s answer hinged on imprecise word usage in an employment contract. (Langford v. Paravant, 912 So.2d 359, (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. (2005)) Did an insurance ...
A persistent debate in corporate law is a basic question: Is shareholder primacy positive law? In a forthcoming article in the Minnesota Law Review, I present a positive theory of law. A summary of the article's core idea can be found in here. A draft of the article is here on SSRN.
I have been experiencing the Swedish healthcare system up close and personal for the past week, so in light of the debate in the US, I thought I might share that experience. It is a universal healthcare system, but it is well to remember that I am here as a ...
I am now three weeks in to my Fulbright experience at Lund University, in southern Sweden, the area known as Skane. I have the privilege of being situated at a leading human rights institution, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI), with an amazing and talented ...
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to reverse many of President Obama’s executive actions. But with a mere stroke of the pen, can one president so easily undo the work of his predecessor? At least in the context of national monuments, the answer is likely “no.” President Obama has created or enlarged ...
This blog post is for the readership of students. In my previous blog post, I relayed data in a blog post on Legal Whiteboard that 70.8% of legal fees in 2012 were generated by business clients in comparison to 23.9% by individuals. This blog post presents data showing the business incomes of ...
This blog post is for the readership of students. Over at The Legal Whiteboard blog, Professor Bill Henderson, a leading scholar in the economics of the legal profession, has a blog post that law students may find interest. He collects data on revenue for legal services in years 2007 and 2012. ...
"Lying within the lake" is a simple phrase, and we know what it means. Yet it was central to a contract dispute involving $20 million. The case addressed the rights of a rock-quarry company's owner (Mr. Elmore) to excavate material from a human-made lake on land that Mr. Elmore had owned ...
Seeking data about how to make law-school graduates more practice-ready, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System conducted its "Foundations for Practice" survey in 2014-15. More than 24,000 lawyers in the U.S. participated. The lawyers rated the importance of 147 skills, competencies, and traits (called "foundations") in one of four ways: (1) “Necessary immediately for ...
A recent Illinois Supreme Court opinion added fuel to the long debate over "shall," a word historically used to convey a mandatory or prohibited action in contracts and legislation. (Thanks to Legal Writing Prof for posting about it.) In People v. Geiler, the defendant argued that a traffic citation should be ...
At a cocktail party, verb tense errors may or may not matter. Fellow guests probably won't remember how you spoke anyway. When construing statutes and other binding documents, courts have cared about verb tense. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court said, "Congress' use of a verb tense is significant in construing ...
During my introduction to contract drafting last week, I reviewed with my students a contracts case that hinged on the meaning of a common, four-letter word: “sale.” Many lawyers wouldn’t think to look up “sale” in a dictionary because everyone "knows" what it means. That seemingly clear word caused a $7.5 million ...
This article first appeared on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange and Youth Today on September 6, 2015 Having law enforcement officers in schools is not a new concept. The first school resource officer (SRO) was assigned to a school in Flint, Michigan, in the 1950s. But after several high-profile acts of ...
Originally posted on Education Law Prof Blog where Professor Nance was a guest blogger. Read the original post here. In re Expulsion of A.D. describes the expulsion of a student in southern Minnesota for accidentally bringing a small pocketknife to school. A school liaison officer found the knife while conducting a random ...
This blog post is for current 1L and 2L students who are interested doing corporate law practice at a big or major law firm. "Business law" practice can encompass a broad range of practices. The discussion here focuses on corporate transactional practice. What courses should you be taking? Our website has a ...
This is a blog post by Professor Sokol for students, particularly 1Ls. I am posting it on his behalf. This week I gave a speech at the 1L dinner about how to approach networking. Below are follow up remarks that I provided to the 1L class. My hope is that these ...