FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

How do blogs change legal education?

There is an interesting discussion on the blog Balkinization on the topic of how blogs change legal education. 
Read it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Tenzin Tsundue

Ask me where I'm from and I won't have an answer. I feel I never really belonged anywhere. Never really had a home. I was born in Manali, but my parents live in Karnataka. Finishing my schooling in two different schools in Himachal Pradesh, my further studies took me Madras, Ladakh and Mumbai.[...] I have nowhere to call home and in the world at large all I'll ever be is a 'political refugee'.

These are the words of Tenzin Tsundue, "a talented activist poet and essayist of Tibetan extraction." Via  Amardeep Singh

Tsunde's latest words: Lhasa, in translation

In the Upper Valley
Is a three-peaked snowy mountain          
It is not a mountain
It is the throne of my guru
Of my Guru Padmasambhava

~A song of devotion to the Great Guru of Tibet, Padmasambhava (From A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey)

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Law of War

The online version of the Jurist has recently published two op-eds on the laws of war by Geoffrey S. Corn.  They are: When the Law of War Becomes Over-lawyered and For the Sake of Warriors: Accepting the Limits of the Law of War.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Geneva Conventions

The Geneva Conventions a Reference Guide can be found on the Society of Professional Journalists web site.  This includes both commentary and texts of the Geneva Conventions. 

It can be found here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Early Supreme Court Decision Dates

Sometimes it's hard to determine the exact date of early Supreme Court decisions, because the date of the decision doesn't appear below the case name in the first 107 volumes of the U.S. Reports.  But now there is a list online titled: Dates of Supreme Court Decisions and Arguments, United States Reports Volumes 2-107 (1791 - 1882).  The list was prepared by Anne Ashmore.

See it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?

There's an interesting article in the November 8, 2006 National Law Journal, The Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?  Here's an excerpt:

Professor Charles Nesson, a pioneer in the use of technology in legal education and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, is teaching an experimental class called "CyberOne: Law and the Court of Public Opinion." He's talking to students about how to make an argument not just to a judge, but to a global audience. As he puts it, CyberOne is "a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space." Students are figuring out how to use blogs, podcasts, wikis, online video and virtual worlds to build their cases inside and outside of the courtroom. It's out there-both figuratively and literally, as it's also being taught in Second Life, a virtual world. Then again, Nesson is usually onto something when he's out there.

These experiments may well lead to greater use of technology in law school classrooms. But the broader question lingers: Can technology play a transformative role in legal education at a systemic level? At the Berkman Center, in partnership with LexisNexis, we've begun a research project this fall to survey lawyers and law faculties about what they think on this front. By the end of the year, we expect to publish the results and highlight some of the most promising ways forward. We don't yet know where this study will lead, but it's pretty clear that the answer doesn't lie in law schools starting to teach technology-specific courses. After all, a smart young lawyer can figure out how to use a new e-discovery software package in a few hours.

Read the entire article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

The "You Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours" Business Model

How Some Firms in India Succeed by Bypassing Entrenched Financial and Legal Systems

And how things such as fictitious road repairs are getting a second look under the Right to Information Act (2005).

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Law Blogs Creating Ethics Problem

There may be as many as 2000 law blogs which discuss topics from bioethics, to legal theory, to environmental law and everything in between, but an ethical problem has arisen as to how much of the content is speech and how much is advertising.  An article in the October 6, 2006 National Law Journal Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues discusses this:

Many states are in the process of revamping their attorney ethics rules, and part of that process involves the prickly issue of whether blogs should be regulated as advertising.

On the one hand, states want to protect consumers from unscrupulous lawyer advertising presented under the guise of an online diary. On the other hand, they want to preserve the free flow of ideas-and valuable legal information presented in a public forum-that the new technology has fostered.

And thanks to Mary McCormick for another source on this, from the November 7, 2006 Chicago Tribune, Lawyers face right to blog; Kentucky

has rules that broadly define advertising to include virtually any communication to the public by a lawyer that contains any information about the lawyer or the lawyer's practice. The rules also require that ads must be submitted for commission approval, along with a $50 filing fee.

Read the whole article:
Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues
Lawyers face right to blog

Posted by Jon Lutz

Germline Patents

The blog, Biolaw: Law and the Life Sciences, has an interesting post on  a recent European Patent that includes a method of gender selecting for sperm.  Biolaw points out that the patent not only applies to this method, but in addition also claims that cover sperm cells themselves and that nowhere are the claims limited to non-human mammals.  The notion of human germline patents is controversial.

Read the whole post here.

Read the European Patent law claims here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law School Curriculum

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer has a long post in the Blog Law School Innovation on the topic of law school curriculum:

Ask any law school graduate what was the most significant intellectual experience he or she had in law school (that is, what really shaped their thinking, what stuck with them, what mattered most), and almost all will give the same answer: the first year. This seems to be true no matter what law school they attended, no matter what career they chose to pursue, and whether they graduated last year or fifty years ago. I spend probably half my time talking to Stanford graduates, usually beginning a first meeting by talking about their time here, and I get this answer almost 100% of the time. The first year, in other words, is the part of law school that really seems to work. The problem with legal education is in the second and third year and consists mainly of failing to keep students engaged by offering them something of equivalent educational and intellectual value to what they got in the first year. It is, from that perspective, puzzling to see not just Harvard, but most schools that think about curriculum reform focus all their energy on changing the first year.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz