With the support of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Courts and Media, based at National Judicial College and the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, is pleased to announce the creation of the Reynolds Courts and Media Law Journal.
We will begin publishing in 2011, and are seeking legal and scholarly articles on the interaction of the courts and the media, and the impact and implications of this interaction. Examples of possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
* Media access to court proceedings (including cameras, new media in the courtroom)
* Conflicts between First Amendment and Sixth Amendment principles and values
* Impact of social and new media on court proceedings
* Process and implications of online access to court records and proceedings
* Analysis of specific examples and cases of court-media conflict situations
Judges, attorneys, journalists and professors are invited to submit (via e-mail) ideas, proposals or drafts for articles of up to 30,000 words (including text and footnotes). The journal will be published in print and online.
Electronic submissions in Microsoft Word format strongly preferred. Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) or Blue Book legal citation format is preferred; other social science citation formats are also accepted, but citations must be in footnotes, not endnotes or parentheticals.
Submissions, ideas and questions should be sent to courtsandmedia@unr.edu.
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on November 21st, 2010
| CALLS FOR PAPERS, Communications Law, Constitutional Law, Courts, Law and Cyberspace |
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Yale Law School hosted the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies 2010 Nov. 5-6, 2010. You can read 82 abstracts (and often papers) presented are on SSRN. The final program (with a montage of Yale realists) is here.
Topics addressed include nearly every major area of law. The most presentations concerned courts (including judges and juries), securities law and business law, and comparative law.
Since this is the Legal Scholarship Blog, it seems appropriate to share the abstract of a paper about legal scholarship:
Schwartz, David L. and Petherbridge, Lee, The Use of Legal Scholarship by the Federal Courts of Appeals: An Empirical Study (August 17, 2010). Cornell Law Review, Vol. 96, 2011; 5th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Paper; Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2010-38. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1640681
Chief Justice Roberts recently explained that he does not pay much attention to law review articles, reportedly stating that they are not “particularly helpful for practitioners and judges.” Chief Justice Roberts’s criticism echoes that made by other judges, some of whom, like Judge Harry Edwards, have been much more strident in the contention that legal scholarship is largely unhelpful to practitioners and judges. Perhaps inspired by criticisms like those leveled by Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Edwards, legal scholars have sought to investigate the relevance of legal scholarship to courts and practitioners using a variety of means. One avenue of investigation has been empirical, where several studies, using different, and sometimes ambiguous, methodologies have observed a decrease in citation to legal scholarship and interpreted the observation to mean that legal scholarship has lost relevance to courts and practitioners.
The study reported here examines the hypothesis that legal scholarship has lost relevance to courts. Using empirical techniques and an original dataset that is substantially more comprehensive than those used in previous studies, it examines citation to legal scholarship by the United States circuit courts of appeals over the last 59 years. It finds a rather surprising result. Contrary to the claims of Justice Roberts and Judge Edwards, and contrary to the results of prior studies, this study finds that over the last 59 years – and particularly over the last 20 years – there has been a marked increase in the frequency of citation to legal scholarship in the reported opinions of the circuit courts of appeals. Using empirical and theoretical methods, this study also considers explanations for courts’ increased use of legal scholarship.
Posted by uwlegalscholarship on November 21st, 2010
| CONFERENCES |
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