Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing for International Graduate Students
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Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing for International Graduate Students, Fifth Edition, helps international students understand and approach legal reasoning and writing the way law students and attorneys do in the United States. With concise and clear text, Professor Nedzel introduces the unique and important features of the American legal system and American law schools. Using clear instruction, examples, visual aids, and practice exercises, she teaches practical lawyering skills with sensitivity to the challenges of ESL students. Five chapters on reasoning and writing, including exam skills, office memos, and rewriting. Full chapters on contract drafting and scholarly writing. New flowcharts provide a concise, visual overview for each chapter. Citation coverage updated to new 21st edition of The Bluebook.
Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide provides law students with all the guidance and information they need to complete and succeed in their LLB, LLM or law-related dissertation. Written in an accessible, clear format and with plenty of tools to help put the theory into practice, Laura Lammasniemi will show students how to make writing a law dissertation easy, without compromising intellectual rigour. The primary aim of this book is to tackle the issues that cause anxiety to law students undertaking a dissertation so that they can focus on the research that you find exciting. As well as explaining the process of research and outlining the various legal research approaches, the book also provides practical, step-by-step guidance on how to formulate a proposal, research plan, and literature review. The second edition expands guidance to LLM and Masters students, and provides up-to-date guidance on how to complete your project using both online resources and remotely. Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide includes a section on empirical research methodology and ethics for the benefit of students who are studying for a Masters in law. Packed full of exercises, worked examples, and tools for self-evaluation, this book is sure to become an essential guide for law students, supporting them on every step of their dissertation journey.
Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review
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Designed to help law students write and publish articles, this text provides detailed instructions for every aspect of the law school writing, research, and publication process. Topics covered include law review articles and student notes, seminar term papers, how to shift from research to writing, cite-checking others' work, publishing, and publicizing written works.
Scolarly Writing for Law Students--Seminar Papers, Law Review Notes and Law Review Competition Papers
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In order to inspire and motivate their readers, the authors have appended a selective list of student notes and comments and a chapter on techniques to help writers narrow their subjects and find theses. The authors added a section on reading for types of legal argument and an exercise to address increasing student concern over plagiarism. Includes a short section on the importance of editorial cooperation and communication. Offers a new chapter on entering writing competitions and publishing.
Beyond the First Draft
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Beyond the First Draft helps law students and lawyers approach the often difficult task of editing their own writing. The book starts with the fundamental idea that good writing is organized, vigorous, clear, and polished. Its ultimate goal is to help students and practitioners understand that good writing cannot be accomplished in a single draft; good writers must be good editors. Each chapter of the book is organized around one of the principles of good writing and begins with an editing checklist for accomplishing that principle of good writing. The book explains each item in the checklist, providing both students and lawyers with the instruction and straightforward editing tips that they need to become effective editors. Beyond the First Draft was written with law students, practitioners, and legal writing professors in mind. Its straightforward approach makes even those difficult-to-understand grammatical concepts accessible to everyone through frequent, easy-to-understand reminders, explanations, and examples. The updated second edition of the book includes a new introduction that helps writers think about the ways in which language evolves over time and puts the book's expanded coverage of pronouns into context. In addition, this new introduction will give professors and students alike the opportunity to think critically about the ways in which the formal written English of legal writing differs from both informal written and spoken English.
Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research
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Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Herbert Kritzer presents a clear introduction to the history, methods and substance of empirical legal research (ELR). Quantitative methods dominate in empirical legal research, but an important segment of the field draws on qualitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews and observation. In this book both methodologies are explored alongside systematic data analysis. Offering an overview of the broad ELR literature, the institutions of the law, the central actors of the law, and the subjects of the law are each addressed Key features include: Summaries of the history of empirical legal research A clear introduction to methods in empirical legal research Coverage of both quantitative and qualitative methods and research A readable guide to the impact and rationale of different methodologies. This relatively short book provides an invaluable quick introduction for students, scholars, legal professionals and policy professionals.
Georgetown Law School Writing Center: Guides and Handouts: Numerous helpful guides to assessing legal authority, Bluebook citation, legal analysis, legal research, scholarly writing, and writing checklists and tips
You will want to avoid plagiarism in your legal writing. International students sometimes find the rules for citation and attribution in U.S. academia are different from what they are used to.
The Emory Law Student Handbook (2023-2024) defines plagiarism or plagiarism as "using, intentionally or not, a written document or electronic record reflecting the ideas or words of another as one's own without proper attribution to the source of those ideas or words."
Emory Law Research Guides that you might find helpful include:
Resources for International Students: Using Sources: Includes a PowerPoint presentation on Using Sources in Papers by Marta Baffy and Kirsten Schaetzel, which includes examples of citations, quotes, and paraphrasing.
Instructional Support - Plagiarism Resources for Emory Law Faculty: The Additional Resources page includes a bibliography with links of library guides, books, and articles on plagiarism
SJD students writing dissertations usually want to see examples of other dissertations for form and style.
To find dissertations by other SJD candidates that have been published and bound and added to the Emory Law Library collection, search in the Emory Library Catalog using the Advanced Search, with "S.J.D." in All Fields, and "Emory" and "School of Law" in the Publisher field. Dissertations are cataloged by their subject matter, so they are not found together in the library collection.
Databases that you might search for other dissertation and thesis examples include:
Official digital archive of the Library of Congress and the database of record for graduate research. Search citations to dissertations and theses from around the world from 1861 to present day, and access full text dissertations.
Some articles and other publications on methodologies for comparative legal research include:
John C. Reitz, How To Do Comparative Law, 46 American Journal of Comparative Law 617 (1998).
Methodologies of Legal Research
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Until quite recently questions about methodology in legal research have been largely confined to understanding the role of doctrinal research as a scholarly discipline. In turn this has involved asking questions not only about coverage but, fundamentally, questions about the identity of the discipline. Is it (mainly) descriptive, hermeneutical, or normative? Should it also be explanatory? Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behaviour, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient. This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions. Several chapters discuss comparative law research.
Rethinking Comparative Law
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As law's institutional configurations stand, comparative law is a relatively new discipline. The first specialized journals and chairs, for example, go back a mere two hundred years or so. Yet, in its two centuries of institutional existence, comparative law has been the focus of much discussion, mostly by comparatists themselves reflecting on their practice. Indeed, some of this thinking came firmly to establish itself as a governing epistemology within the field. This book holds that the time has nonetheless come, even for such a young venture as comparative law, to engage in a re-thinking of its intellectual ways. Specifically, three comparatists hailing from different horizons investigate various assumptions and lines of reasoning that must invite reconsideration. The principal ambition informing the work is to optimize the interpretive rewards that the comparison of laws is in a position to generate. Not limited to a particular country or jurisdiction, Rethinking Comparative Law aims to attract a large audience comprising students and scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds. Undergraduate or postgraduate law students and lawyers with an interest in comparative law will find the book helpful for a better appreciation of the many implications arising from the increased interaction with foreign law in a globalizing world.
A Research Agenda for Comparative Law
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Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This prescient Research Agenda explores how comparative law has developed significantly in this century, offering insights into different perspectives on its scope, methods and outlook. It addresses the similarities and differences between legal systems and traditions, expressing why pluralistic methodology strengthens comparative law as a discipline. Chapters cover critical topics including decolonial comparative law, comparative law and cyberspace, and anthropological approaches to comparative law, ultimately constructing a theoretical framework that builds towards future potential research ventures. Editor Jaakko Husa brings together a strong collective of experts to illustrate how the plurality and interdisciplinary nature of the field does not necessarily lead researchers to a single, normative path. Legal scholars seeking new avenues for comparative law studies will find this Research Agenda highly inspiring, whilst students will also benefit from the book's leading scholarly insights.
Comparative Law Methodology
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This research review examines the most significant and instructive articles relating to comparative law methodology. They offer vast and comprehensive coverage of practices, principles, methods and sources in comparative legal research. The first section deals with preliminary considerations such as the aims of research and the questions one should ask, as well as how to select objects for comparison and formulate a research plan. The second part focuses on the comparative research of regulation, description, and explanation, along with discussion on functionalism, quantitative approaches, translation issues, legal transplants and global challenges. This review offers a balanced discussion of the seminal research which will benefit legal scholars, students, and all who are undertaking, or seeking to evaluate, comparative legal research. Includes an introductory review article on method and methodology of comparative law, and a list of recommended readings on the subject.
Questions about using searching the catalog, using the scanners, checking out books, or interlibrary loan? See our guide to Using the MacMillan Law Library.
