There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.
Fred Rodell “Goodbye to Law Reviews” 23 Virginia Law Review 38 (1936) at 38.
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Leaving aside their citation styles, there may be a third problem with law reviews: their paper format. The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, calling for the wholesalde abandonment of paper in favour of exclusively online publication, has been causing a small stir of late:
Objective: The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. To accomplish this end, law schools should commit to making agreed-upon stable, open, digital formats, rather than print, the preferable formats for legal scholarship. If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. ….
See Berkman | Goodson Blogson | Law Librarian Blog | Legal Research Plus | Legal Writing Prof Blog | Library Boy. This is not a new claim, and I agree that this kind of approach represents the future of law reviews, but this call strikes me as premature.…
Updating Legal citation:
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Bonus link: Offences against the library (via Daithí) updates Consequences.…
One of my favourite blogs meets one of my favourite radio prgrammes.
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This is how the radio show’s website introduced the programme:
The Destruction of Carthage – “Delenda Carthago!”
The North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second century BC it suffered a terrible fate. … Carthage was destroyed by Rome and destroyed utterly; its people scattered and its library broken up. The Romans removed Carthage from history with such effect that it’s hard to know the city save through Roman eyes. But the ghosts of Carthage haunted the citizens of Rome and for many Romans the destruction of opulent and civilised Carthage was not a moment of triumph, but a harbinger of Rome’s own fate.
This is how the blog described the programme:
…In Our Time
Rome vs Carthage can be a pretty blokeish subject, so it was a nice dare to have an all-woman panel: me, Ellen O’Gorman from Bristol and Jo Crawley Quinn from Oxford. … we managed to come down on different sides of one key Carthage question: what was the city like in the third century BC, just before the Punic wars.
Jo and Ellen took the view that it was really opulent, the Queen of the Mediterranean or (as Jo put it) “the New York of the third century BC’.
Scene II, the Sermon on the Mount, from the perspective of back of the crowd, where Jesus can barely be heard over the hubub:
GREGORY: What was that? …
MAN #1: I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ …
MRS. GREGORY: Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
GREGORY: Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Inspired by Cheese maker settles case over ingredient claim…
Spirit Moves is a discussion programme on RTÉ Radio which explores ethical issues that arise from current news events. It is broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday evenings at 6:00pm; it is re-broadcast on RTÉ Choice (one of RTÉ’s Digital Radio Stations) on Monday afternoons at 4:00pm; and episodes -including this – are available to stream here. This evening’s programme discussed the ethical and legal issues that arise in the context of reporting suicide. The host was Tom McGurk, and the participants included Colum Kenny, Joan Freeman, Paul Drury, Tom Clonan, and Lisa O’Carroll.
Suicide is a serious and tragic social issue, on which several indefatigable organisations do sterling work. In particular, reporting it has been the subject of a conference (pdf) by the Irish Association of Suicidology, and of a report (pdf) by the National Office of Suicide Prevention. The American Association of Suicidology has developed a set of sensitive guidelines on the reporting of suicide; and Headline (blogged here) is doing something similar in Ireland.
The Press Council has recently published a very interesting Discussion Document (pdf) on the issue. As I’ve previously argued on this blog, the key point is that much of the reason for sensationalist media coverage (that sells papers or delivers audience share) is because we – the general public – buy the papers and listen to or watch the programmes.…
Via University of Louisville Law Faculty Blog:
Bonus link: In a similar vein, see Lawyer’s Humor, Circa 1875 from the Legal History Blog.…
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