Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher Recent documents in Ian Gallacher en-us Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:56:23 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/12 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/12 Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:15:26 PST This article is a manifesto that outlines the principles of the open access to legal information movement and sounds a call to action for law schools to become leaders in that movement. The article surveys the present legal information environment, reviews the development of computer-assisted legal information and the long-term future of book-based legal research, and discusses the problems inherent in a system where two large "information resource" corporations control access to legal information. After considering the need for open access to the law for pro se litigants, scholars from outside the legal academy, and practicing lawyers, after considering and rejecting courts and legislators as viable guarantors of open access, and with the model of the clinical legal community's tradition of engaged scholarship as an example, the article concludes that America's law schools have both the opportunity and obligation to provide an alternative to the commercial legal information sites and make America's law freely available to all. The article ends with a series of proposed principles that might guide such an open-access legal information site. Ian Gallacher Legal Analysis and Writing http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/10 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/10 Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:46:56 PDT As the law moves inexorably to a digital publication model in which books no longer play a role, the problem of how to continue to make the law available to all becomes more acute. Open access initiatives already exist, and more are on the way, but all are limited by their inability to provide more than self-indexed search options for their users. Self-indexing, although a powerful alternative to the traditional pre-indexed searching made possible by systems like West's "Key Number" digests, has inherent limitations which make it a poor choice as the sole means of researching the law. But developing a new pre-indexed legal digest would be a prohibitively expensive and complex undertaking, making it unlikely that open access legal information sites can develop and maintain a fully-implemented digesting approach to legal research. This article proposes a reconceptualization of the information already contained within most American judicial opinions in order to permit open access sites to offer a form of pre-indexed research to their users. By mapping a case's location in a graphical representation of the doctrinal development of an issue under consideration, this approach allows the court's citations to prior authority to act as a pre-indexing tool, allows the researcher to update the law by showing more recent cases that have cited to the target case, and gives the researcher the opportunity to trace network links in order to uncover connections between cases that might otherwise have been difficult to discern. Ian Gallacher Legal Analysis and Writing http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/7 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/7 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:52:42 PDT This article looks at the phenomenon of legal citation and its unintended consequences. After considering the reasons for the American legal system's devotion to precisely accurate and detailed citations and the history of American legal citation, the article looks at the effect the bibliographical orthodoxy promoted by the two leading citation manuals - The Bluebook and the ALWD Manual - has on open access to the law. In particular, the article looks at how the required common law citation format prescribed by both of these manuals helps to consolidate the market position of West and LexisNexis, the duopoly of legal publishing in this country. After considering the inadequacy of some present-day open access legal information sites, and exploring why it is that market pressures make it unlikely that a viable commercial competitor to the West/Lexis duopoly will emerge, the article concludes that the best approach to ensuring that the law remain free and open to all is through the use of a neutral citation format to describe case law and the formation of a consortium of American law schools to publish the law on the internet. Ian Gallacher Legal Analysis and Writing http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/6 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/6 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:46:54 PDT This article summarizes various modes of Constitutional and musical interpretation and imagines how Justice Antonin Scalia might interpret Beethoven's Eroica symphony using the Constitutional interpretative philosophy he espouses. Ian Gallacher Law and Humanities http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/4 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/4 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:38:17 PDT This article seeks to answer the questions of what students should learn about legal research and who should teach them. It identifies the cultural tension between those who endorse traditional book-based research and those who embrace computer-assisted legal research, looks at the virtues and pitfalls of both approaches, and reflects on some pedagogical strategies the legal research teaching community might adopt in order to help improve law students' ability to conduct effective and efficient legal research. Ian Gallacher Legal Analysis and Writing http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/2 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/2 Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:01:30 PDT This chapter seeks to take the characters and situations of Gay's The Beggar's Opera and consider how closely the play's portrayal matches the historical record. Although the view offered by the play is a restricted one, the chapter concludes that the picture it offers is as close to historical reality as any other document from the period. Ian Gallacher Legal History http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/1 http://works.bepress.com/ian_gallacher/1 Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:01:06 PDT This article presents the results of a summer 2006 survey of students about to begin their first year of law school. In total, 740 students from seven different law schools responded to the survey. The survey gathered general information from the students, as well as self-evaluative data on student reading, writing, and research habits in an attempt to understand how the students perceive their skills in these crucial areas. The survey data suggest that while there is some positive news to report, incoming law students overestimate their writing and research skills and come to law school inadequately trained in information literacy. The article concludes with an analysis of some of the broad conclusions suggested by the data from this survey and from other studies of law student and new lawyers, and proposes some possible remedies for the skills deficits displayed by incoming law students. Ian Gallacher Legal Analysis and Writing