This guide will help you when it comes time to research your seminar paper. This guide is general in scope so be sure and check out our other guides at http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/lawlibrary to see if there is one related to the topic you are researching.
Scholarly Writing for Law Students by This book fills an important niche in legal-writing literature by teaching law students how to write scholarly papers for seminars, law reviews, and law-review competitions and how to have their work recognized. It helps novices and more experienced scholars alike to write papers with a minimum of anxiety and a maximum of creativity. Employing a process theory of writing, the text first describes the enterprise of scholarly writing and then discusses techniques for brainstorming topics and theses, researching, drafting, and revising for substance and style. It covers both traditional doctrinal topics and newer areas like empirical studies. There are also chapters on footnotes, avoiding plagiarism, law review practice, and dissemination of student work through publication and submission to national writing competitions. Appendices provide a sample law-review competition paper, answers to in-text exercises, sample syllabi for scholarly writing courses, and a rubric for evaluating and editing scholarly papers and articles.
Guide to Legal Research and Writing from the Transnational Perspective by Contains concise practical tips that will assist students in the research and writing process. Includes sections dealing with seminar papers, topic selection, and writing techniques. Samples of articles written by the author will provide a model for scholarly writing.
Making Law Review: The Expert's Guide to Mastering the Write-On Competition by Every year, law students across the country participate in the write-on competition for a shot at the most highly coveted prize in law school: membership on the law review. But until now, law students had nowhere to turn to for reliable information regarding the competition. This book has changed all that. Making Law Review explains how the competition works, and reveals the surprising and innovative techniques students have used to excel in it. Author Wes Henricksen interviewed dozens of current and former law review members at many of the top law schools to learn their secrets to success in the write-on competition. This book synthesizes those students' experiences into a comprehensive body of valuable advice on topics such as how to best prepare for the competition, how to effectively allocate your time throughout it, and how to write a winning submission paper.
Academic Legal Writing by 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. With supporting documents available on http://volokh.com/writing, the book helps law students and everyone else involved in academic legal writing: professors save time and effort communicating basic points to students; law schools satisfy the American Bar Association's second- and third-year writing requirements; and law reviews receive better notes from their staff. The Fourth Edition adds examples drawn from successful student notes, coupled with detailed explanations of what makes the examples effective, and how they could have been made still more effective. It also elaborates further on how one can research a topic more comprehensively than many students do, both by finding a broader range of examples and applications, and by investigating the key cases more deeply.
Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Each week, readers learn a particular feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. At the end of twelve weeks, they send their article to a journal. This invaluable resource is the only guide that focuses specifically on publishing humanities and social science journal articles.
How to Write a Law Review Article by Richard Delgado, How to Write a Law Review Article, 20 U.S.F. L. Rev. 445 (1985).
The author wrote this article to explain in simple fashion some rules, conventions, and shortcuts he learned over the years as a legal writer. He explains the various steps one ought to consider in writing a law review article, the types and genres of such articles, and a few tips having to do with submission and marketing of one's work.
Teaching Foreign LLM Students About Legal Scholarship by Matthew A. Edwards, Teaching Foreign LLM Students About Legal Scholarship, 51 J. LEGAL EDUC. 520 (2001).
Discusses the purpose and form of law review articles.
Law Students as Legal Scholars: An Essay/Review of Scholarly Writing for Law Students and Academic Legal Writing by 7 N.Y. CITY L. REV. 195 (2004).
Looks at the Falk and Volokh books.
Writing a Student Article by Eugene Volokh, Writing a Student Article, 48 J. LEGAL EDUC. 247 (1998).
The original piece that his book expands on.
For some background information on narratives, storytelling, and outsider scholarship (be sure and check with your editors or instructor regarding these styles of writing) try these:
Narrative and the Legal Discourse : A Reader in Storytelling and the Law by A collection of leading articles relating to the narrative aspects of legal discourse. Supplemented by introductory comments, questions for discussion, suggestions for further reading and indices, this volume explores storytelling in legal education, legal practice and various legal forms, most notably the appellate opinion. A concluding section addresses the articulation of alternative legal narratives by lawbreakers, women, African-Americans and political radicals.Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative by Richard Delgado, Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative, 87 MICH. L. REV. 2411 (1989).
Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative by Robert Nash argues for the validity of an exciting, alternative approach to doing scholarly writing which he calls the "scholarly personal narrative." This book is the result of thirty-five years of supervising student papers, theses, dissertations, and publications.