ABSTRACT:

This contribution introduces a novel approach to study legal interactions, legal professions, and legal institutions, by combining argumentation, game theory and evolution. We consider a population of lawyers, having different postures, who engage in adversarial argumentation with other lawyers, obtaining outcomes according to the existing context and their chosen strategies. We examine the resulting games and analyse the evolution of the population.

European University Institute Working Paper Series

This new framework has enabled us to show that given certain hypotheses concerning the costs of proceeding, the most successful posture for a lawyer is to be non-honest and nonaggressive, followed by being honest and aggressive, then by being honest and non-aggressive, and finally by being non-honest and aggressive. In other words, given that framework, being non-honest pays only when one is non-aggressive, while aggressiveness only pays when coupled with honesty. We have also shown that by changing the external variable (in particular by reducing the costs of adversarial contest), dishonesty may lose its edge. Our dynamical analysis, while being still very preliminary, also leads to interesting results, such as the emergence (given a certain cost structure) of an environment where non-honest lawyers tend to prevail, followed by non-honest and aggressive ones, while the frequency of the honest and non-aggressive tends to decrease. More important, we the ideas presented in the present paper pave the way for future developments where AI and law can be combined not only with argumentation theory but also with legal sociology and (behavioural) economics.

”Balance is the key to quality judicial writing . . . because pride unrestrained can stiffen resistance, or even close the mind entirely, to helpful suggestions from others.”

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1555959

Professor Abrams (University of Missouri School of Law) authors a column, Writing it Right, in Precedent, The Missouri Bar’s quarterly magazine. In a variety of contexts, the column stresses the fundamentals of quality legal writing – precision, conciseness, simplicity, and clarity

NOTE:

This article is adapted from Professor Abrams’ address to the international meeting of the Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions in Halifax, Nova Scotia on August 7, 2009.

Many recent journal articles are online, and law professors are accustomed to posting working drafts on sites like the Social Science Research Network and Bepress. It is time to put law journals online, easily accessible to all, and to keep them online by preserving them in IRs (Institutional Repositories).

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1554399

While the download page is titled “Abstract”, this link appears to contain the full article.

http://tinyurl.com/yaqyrfb

By John Conley, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Law School

To study the performance of trial judges is to study public behavior and public documents.    It is thus inherently doable, even if extraordinarily labor-intensive.  Appellate judges, however, do most of their work in a secret world that is seemingly impenetrable to ethnographers or others who rely on direct observation. One can study only the judgments and opinions they are required to release to the public; the performance that underlies these carefully crafted documents is immune to scrutiny.

LawProfessorBlogs.com includes over 40 blawgs from virtually all topical areas that one can imagine.  The stated goal for these resources are:

Permanent Resources and Links:

• Links to working papers on SSRN, colloquia, and specialized law reviews
• Links to professional organizations for faculty (AALS section, ABA section, etc.)
• Links to think tanks, U.S., state & foreign law sources, publishers, and other web sites of interest

Daily News and Information:

• Upcoming colloquia, conferences, and meetings
• Abstracts of working papers and recently-published scholarship
• Book reviews

…But in actuality they deliver much more than advertised here in the way of case law updates and analysis of legal trends, etc.  Consequently, it’s well worth perusing these blawgs and selecting a few to follow.

…With over 300 online resources being searched.

They also maintain a list of resources which have free full-text available online, but which must be searched/browsed manually.

Cornell University Law Library LEGAL RESEARCH ENGINE

…allows users to do Google-powered searches of

* Legal Research Guides

Prepared, usually by law libraries, to help explain how to do legal research in a particular area.

* The Legal Internet

This is a broad area that can include anything from law firms’ websites that can be information rich or poor,depending on how focused they are on marketing; non-profit organization and government sites, and non-governmental organizations websites all of which tend to be quite information-rich; education institutions which again can be rich sources of information; corporations and private entities, private individuals and miscellaneous sponsors of websites. The question you must ALWAYS ask is WHY have they bothered to put up and maintain the website?

* Academic Blawgs

Many law professors now have blogs on legal topics, or blawgs. Some write on narrow topics, others are all over the map. Some voice their personal opinions, others are writing simply about what the law seems to be. Again, as the consumer, think for yourself.

* or all 3 at once

This appears to be a handy tool worth exploring further…  If you have the opportunity to test it out, let’s hear your feedback.

By Mitchell Berman in the New York University Law Review, courtesy of LegalWorkshop.org:

“The upshot is not that constitutional interpretation should disregard the Framers’ intentions, ratifiers’ understandings, or original public meanings.  Of course we should care about these things.  But we can take the original character of the Constitution seriously without treating it as dispositive.  That original intents and meanings matter is not enough to render originalism true.”

http://legalworkshop.org/

The Legal Workshop is something of a law journal aggregator…  somewhat akin to Legal Scholarship Network at SSRN < http://www.ssrn.com/lsn/index.html >.

Mission:

The Legal Workshop features “op-ed” versions of the articles published by the member journals. These concise and lively pieces are written for a generalist audience, combining the best elements of print and online publication.

Each Legal Workshop Editorial undergoes the same rigorous editorial treatment and quality screening as the journals’ print content, but readers are able to offer comments and esteemed academics have the option of submitting response pieces, which are checked for citations and substance.

By aggregating the work of multiple law reviews, The Legal Workshop is able to provide frequently updated content. New article-based content is posted every Monday and most Wednesdays and Fridays. The Legal Workshop provides a one-stop forum for readers wishing to stay abreast of contemporary legal scholarship.

Current Members:

Cornell Law Review
Duke Law Journal
Georgetown Law Journal
New York University Law Review
Northwestern University Law Review
Stanford Law Review
University of Chicago Law Review

RSS feed:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/legalworkshop