Looking for Advice on Contract Drafting

evowaAbout four years ago, when I started working for my current employer, I was an administrative assistant to a division president. It wasn’t exactly my dream job, but all in all I enjoyed it. One of the things I assisted with was the maintenance of our standard contract templates. It was very much an administrative task (I took dictation and changed what I was told to change), but I did it with pride because it was the only part of my job that was remotely related to the legal field. Throughout my advancements within the division, contract edits never left my realm of responsibilities, and I have now ventured into the area of drafting. (Woo-hoo, fun, you’re probably thinking; but, no, seriously, it is fun.)

What I have grown to appreciate is how difficult it is to maintain contract templates and to ensure that Sales has all the right schedules and exhibits. It seems like every week I am getting requests for reviews, redlines, or amendments, all of which have to be done ASAP. I cringe a little when I hear someone jokingly say “Talk to our resident contract expert” because I know that means me and I know the next contract “fire drill” is about to come my way.

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Fair Use and Legal Education

copyrightI’ve just read Pam Samuelson’s recent article, Unbundling Fair Uses. For this article, Samuelson reviewed just about every fair use opinion since 1978, and reached the conclusion that fair use cases fall into 8  discrete clusters. Within most of those clusters, “it is generally possible to predict whether a use is likely to be fair or unfair.” [2542]

Although others have made this sort of argument before (e.g., copyright giant Alan Latman in a 1960 legislative study, and Mike Madison in a 2004 article), Samuelson is cutting deeply against the grain of modern copyright scholarship in her conclusion. As she notes, the opinion is nearly unanimous among modern copyright scholars (including, I confess, me) that fair use is profoundly unpredictable, a crap shoot. As Larry Lessig has pithily quipped, “Fair use is the right to hire a lawyer.”

For me, one of the most interesting questions that arises from Samuelson’s article is, if she’s right, how could so many copyright scholars have gotten it wrong? And what does that have to do with teaching Civ Pro?

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Duality or Trinity, Scales or Circles: What Approach for Justice in a New Generation?

justiceThis week, I want to try to tie together some aspects of three experiences I recently had, and tell why I believe they reflect something about the evolving nature of justice at this point in human history.

A. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Jr.: A first generation poet; a second generation jurist. I was rooting around in the attic, sorting out books for donation to a local charity, and came across my husband’s grandmother’s 1952 edition of The Family Book of Best Loved Poems, which randomly flipped open to “The Last Leaf” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. I read it and was reflective about the beautiful minds that manifested over the course of two lifetimes, father and son, one as a physician and poet and one as a jurist, each achieving excellence in their unique ways. 

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