What’s New in the Classroom: Legal Research in the Real World

The Advanced Legal Research courses at Marquette have a “real world” focus.  For my part, I have tried to select research problems for final projects and assignments that place students in real world practice situations. 

To the extent that I can, I avoid the “hunt and find” type research problems for which there is one right answer hidden somewhere.  The legal issues the students have to research sometimes, but do not always, have a straightforward answer. 

In the “real world,” legal research and legal writing go hand in hand.  Thus, in addition to their research plan and research log, the students must then submit a written product such as a letter or a memo summarizing their research results for a supervising attorney, a judge, a client, etc.  

This past semester I added a more detailed cost-effective research component than I had in the past.  In some of their research assignments students only had limited Lexis/Westlaw packages (like Westlaw PRO).  In order to completely and accurately respond to the research problem, the students had to come up with a cost-effective research strategy that involved using only a subsection of their current academic Lexis or Westlaw subscription in conjunction with the print materials in the library and the freely available online legal resources like PreCYdent, GPO Access, Thomas and the Cornell Legal Information Institute that we discussed in class.  The student response to my focus on the free legal research options has been largely positive.

This coming semester I plan to deliver research assignments in the variety of different formats students will encounter in practice.  This includes the delivery of research assignments through a larger case file, brief email messages that require further questions for clarification, longer written memos, and spoken conversations.  I look forward to the feedback I will get from my students after next semester.

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The Usefulness of Heroes

Thanks so much, Deans Kearney and O’Hear, for the invitation to serve as the inaugural alumni blogger on this most excellent effort. I added the MULS Faculty Blog to my RSS reader the day it was announced, and am glad to have done so.

You’ll forgive me if I start the new month by focusing on last month’s question: who was your most influential law school professor? I had originally intended to modify the question slightly and praise Professor Christopher Wolfe (pictured above), but I understand all the best points were already covered at the STMS banquet by Dean Kearney and Katie Longley.

So instead, allow me to praise the question itself. In short, it is good that we reflect on who influences us, and it is worthwhile to identify people we look up to and admire. I am currently researching and drafting a law review article that encourages lawyers to be more intentional about selecting a hero to learn from and emulate. (I take the liberty of suggesting several candidates for the job as well.)

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Should Non-Precedential Opinions Be “Precedential But Overrulable” Opinions?

A post at Legal Theory Blog alerted me to Amy E. Sloan‘s new article, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em:  A Pragmatic Approach to Nonprecedential Opinions in the Federal Appellate Courts, 86 Neb. L. Rev. 895 (2008), available on SSRN.  Amy Sloan is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Legal Skills program at University of Baltimore School of Law.  She is well known to legal writing professors, and to many law students, as the author of a popular legal research textbook, Basic Legal Research: Tools and Strategies.

Sloan makes an interesting argument, advocating that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 be amended to assign non-precedential opinions a sort of “mixed” precedential value, specifically, that “non-precedential opinions [would be] binding unless overruled by a later panel’s precedential opinion.”  She contends that giving non-precedential cases this “‘overrulable’ status” would ensure that the opinions’ precedential weight would “correspond[] to their position within the traditional hierarchy of federal decisional law.”  

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