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Should Non-Precedential Opinions Be “Precedential But Overrulable” Opinions?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Legal Theory Blog alerted me to Amy E. Sloan‘s new article, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em:  A Pragmatic Approach to Nonprecedential Opinions in the Federal Appellate Courts, 86 Neb.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Sloan makes an interesting argument, advocating that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 be amended to assign non-precedential opinions a sort of “mixed” precedential value, specifically, that “non-precedential opinions [would be] binding unless overruled by a later panel’s precedential opinion.”  She contends that giving non-precedential cases this “‘overrulable’ status” would ensure that the opinions’ precedential weight would “correspond[] to their position within the traditional hierarchy of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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What Types of Documents Should Law Students Write in Legal Writing Classes?

I am enjoying reading the current issue of the Journal of Legal Education.  In particular, the second article, From Snail Mail to E-mail:  the Traditional Legal Memorandum in the Twenty-First Century, authored by Kristin K. Robbins-Tiscione, has gotten me thinking about the documents we use to teach students in the first-year writing courses.  

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