Although American scholars sometimes consider European legal scholarship as old-fashioned and inward-looking and Europeans often perceive American legal scholarship as amateur social science, both traditions share a joint challenge. If legal scholarship becomes too much separated from practice, legal scholars will ultimately make themselves superfluous. If legal scholars, on the other hand, cannot explain to other disciplines what is academic about their research, which methodologies are typical, and what separates proper research from mediocre or poor research, they will probably end up in a similar situation. Therefore we need a debate on what unites legal academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Should legal scholarship aspire to the status of a science and gradually adopt more and more of the methods, (quality) standards, and practices of other (social) sciences? What sort of methods do we need to study law in its social context and how should legal scholarship deal with the challenges posed by globalization?

This handbook gives legal practitioners, students and new mediators practical guidance on the mediation process. Drawing on her experience as a mediator, academic and a businessperson, Marjorie Mantle takes a down-to-earth approach to mediation, pointing out the pitfalls as well as the benefits.

How to Write Law Essays and Exams provides law students with a practical and proven method of analysing and answering essay and exam questions. The book focuses on those questions that give students the most trouble, namely problem questions, but its techniques are equally applicable to other types of essays. In addition to providing a framework for analysing and writing law essays, the book teaches students how to identify relevant legal authorities, distinguish and harmonise conflicting legal precedents and evaluate the applicability of the law to the facts of the question at hand. The book also contains specific law-related revision techniques and general writing tips. Designed for law students of all levels, including those on A-level, university, conversion, and vocational courses, the text helps students understand their substantive courses while at the same time teaching vital writing and analytical skills. Digital formats and resources The sixth edition is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats, and is supported by online resources. -The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with functionality tools and navigation features: www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks . -The book is accompanied by online resources: a case breakdown to help students with reading cases, frequently asked questions, and some tips on citation styles and conventions.

This account of six families whose children were wrongly seized by child protection services vividly illustrates the constitutional balancing act where medicine, family interests, and child safety can clash. They Took the Kids Last Night shows a rarely exposed side of America's contemporary struggle to address child abuse, telling the stories of loving families who were almost destroyed by false allegations—readily accepted by caseworkers, doctors, the media, and, too often, the courts. Each of the six wrongly accused families profiled in this book faced an epic and life-changing battle when child protection caseworkers came to their homes to take their kids. In each case, a child had an injury whose cause was unknown; it could have been due to an accident, a medical condition, or abuse. Each family ultimately exonerated itself and restored its family life, but still bears scars from the experience that will never disappear. The book tells why and how the child protection system failed these families. It also examines the larger flaws in our country's child protection safety net that is supposed to sort out the innocent from the guilty in order to protect children.

New digital technologies, from AI-fired 'legal tech' tools to virtual proceedings, are transforming the legal system. But much of the debate surrounding legal tech has zoomed out to a nebulous future of 'robo-judges' and 'robo-lawyers.' This volume is an antidote. Zeroing in on the near- to medium-term, it provides a concrete, empirically minded synthesis of the impact of new digital technologies on litigation and access to justice. How far and fast can legal tech advance given regulatory, organizational, and technological constraints? How will new technologies affect lawyers and litigants, and how should procedural rules adapt? How can technology expand - or curtail - access to justice? And how must judicial administration change to promote healthy technological development and open courthouse doors for all? By engaging these essential questions, this volume helps to map the opportunities and the perils of a rapidly digitizing legal system - and provides grounded advice for a sensible path forward.

Since the publication of its first edition in 2005, Advocacy Practice for Social Justice has served as a clear, comprehensive, and practical resource for social work courses in advocacy, community practice, and macro practice. Now in its fourth edition, this text provides extensive information on the value base for advocacy; an examination of why people get involved in advocacy; and step-by-step instructions for social workers and others who want to impact laws, regulations, and policies at any level. Bearing in mind the National Association of Social Workers' Code of Ethics' requirements to advocate on behalf of vulnerable populations, readers learn that advocacy is a problem-solving technique similar to that used in social work practice of all types. The book moves through the stages of advocacy: getting involved; understanding the issue; planning; advocating through education, persuasion, and negotiation; presenting information effectively; monitoring and evaluating results; and integrating advocacy into a social worker's everyday practice. The fourth edition's inclusion of new topics and solid foundation in social work values make it a must-read as social work students and practitioners work diligently to maintain the profession's focus on successful advocacy for social justice.

Winner, 2019 Global Legal Skills Book Award, given by the Global Legal Skills Conference An essential handbook for international lawyers and students Focusing on vocabulary, Essential Legal English in Context introduces the US legal system and its terminology. Designed especially for foreign-trained lawyers and students whose first language is not English, the book is a must-read for those who want to expand their US legal vocabulary and basic understanding of US government. Ross uses a unique approach by selecting legal terms that arise solely within the context of the levels and branches of US government, including terminology related to current political issues such as partisanship. Inspired by her students' questions over her years of teaching, she includes a vast collection of legal vocabulary, concepts, idioms, and phrasal verbs and unpacks concepts embedded in US case law, such as how the US constitutional separation of powers may affect a court's interpretation of the law. The handbook differentiates basic terms in civil and criminal cases and compares terms that may seem similar because of close spellings but in fact have different meanings. For instance, what is the distinction between "taking the stand" and "taking a stand?" What is the difference between "treaties" and "treatises"? Featuring illustrations and hands-on exercises, Essential Legal English in Context is a valuable self-study resource for those who want to improve their legal English terminology before entering a US law school, studying US law or government, or working as a seconded attorney to a US law firm. Instructors can use the handbook in an introductory US legal English course.

In communities plagued by conflict along ethnic, racial, and religious lines, how does the representation of previously-marginalized groups in the police affect crime and security? Drawing on new evidence from policing in Iraq and Israel, Policing for Peace shows that an inclusive police force provides better services and reduces conflict, but not in the ways we might assume. Including members of marginalized groups in the police improves civilians' expectations of how the police and government will treat them, both now and in the future. These expectations are enhanced when officers are organized into mixed rather than homogeneous patrols. Iraqis indicate feeling most secure when policed by mixed officers, even more secure than they feel when policed by members of their own group. In Israel, increases in police officer diversity are associated with lower crime victimization for both Arab and Jewish citizens. In many cases, inclusive policing benefits all citizens, not just those from marginalized groups.

The religion and state debate in Israel has overlooked the Palestinian-Arab religious communities and their members, focusing almost exclusively on Jewish religious institutions and norms and Jewish majority members. Because religion and state debates in many other countries are defined largely by minority religions' issues, the debate in Israel is anomalous. Michael Karayanni advances a legal matrix that explains this anomaly by referencing specific constitutional values. At the same time, he also takes a critical look at these values and presents the argument that what might be seen as liberal and multicultural is at its core just as illiberal and coercive. In making this argument, A Multicultural Entrapment suggests a set of multicultural qualifications by which one should judge whether a group based accommodation is of a multicultural nature.

Over the last decade, cost pressures, technology, automation, globalisation, de-regulation, and changing client relationships have transformed the practice of law, but legal education has been slow to respond. Deciding what learning objectives a law degree ought to prioritise, and how to best strike the balance between vocational and academic training, are questions of growing importance for students, regulators, educators, and the legal profession. This collection provides a range of perspectives on the suite of skills required by the future lawyer and the various approaches to supporting their acquisition. Contributions report on a variety of curriculum initiatives, including role-play, gamification, virtual reality, project-based learning, design thinking, data analytics, clinical legal education, apprenticeships, experiential learning and regulatory reform, and in doing so, offer a vision of what modern legal education might look like.

Bridging disparate literatures on courts and the legal profession in China, Jonathan J. Kinkel introduces an innovative cross-disciplinary framework to understand the reality of Chinese politics and society. Fusing a variety of perspectives from social ecology, historical institutionalism, and empirical legal studies, Kinkel contextualises patterns of court reform within China's rapid economic and social transformations. This book's extensive case studies emphasise the dynamic expansion of the legal system in the post-Mao reform period and demonstrate that law firm growth in large cities, especially in the early twenty-first century, pressured courts at the local and national levels to enhance judicial autonomy. Advancing debates on the multiplicity of political-legal regimes, this book offers a comprehensive, empirical account of how reforms in both the public and private arenas can interact and operate alongside one another.

Law schools currently do an excellent job of helping students to 'think like a lawyer,' but empirical data show that clients, legal employers, and the legal system need students to develop a wider range of competencies. This book helps legal educators to understand these competencies and provides practical ways to build them into a law school curriculum. Based on recommendations from the American Bar Association, the American Association of Law Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it will equip students with the skills they need not only to think but to act and feel like a lawyer. With this proposed model, students will internalize the need for professional development toward excellence, their responsibility to others, a client-centered approach to problem solving, and strong well-being practices. These four goals constitute a lawyer's professional identity, and this book empowers legal educators to foster each student's development of a professional identity that leads to a gratifying career that serves society well. This title is Open Access.

Proposes groundbreaking, fundamental reform for the adversarial legal system to keep innocent people from going to prison We rely on the adversarial legal system to hold offenders accountable, ensure everyone is playing by the same rules, and keep our streets safe. Unfortunately, a grave condition lingers under the surface: at all times the imprisonment of possibly tens of thousands of innocent people. The Plea of Innocence offers a fundamental reform of the adversarial system: plausibly innocent people may now plead innocent and require the government to search for exonerating facts; in return, they will be required to waive their right to remain silent, speak to government agents, and participate in a search for truth. While almost all the participants within the system hope that only guilty people will be convicted, the unfortunate reality is that innocent people are convicted and imprisoned at an alarming rate. With the privatization of defense institutions, accused innocent people are themselves responsible for finding the facts that could exonerate them. Though the poor are represented by public defenders-in fact, almost no one who is charged with a crime has enough money to pay for a complete defense-it is still accused people, not public officials, who bear the entire burden of proving their innocence. Tim Bakken believes that reform of the three-hundred-year-old adversarial system is long overdue, and that the government should be responsible for searching for truth-exonerating facts for innocent people-rather than being satisfied with due process. While it is improbable that all the facts in any case will ever be known, the essential point is that the acquisition of facts will almost always benefit an innocent person who has been accused of a crime. Featuring compelling evidence and concrete steps for reform, The Plea of Innocence is at once sensible and revolutionary, a must-read for anyone invested in restoring truth to the justice system.

What is the future of civil rights? Like a living thing, discrimination evolves, adapting to its time. As discrimination becomes more individualized, as difference becomes more pronounced, we need a civil rights that is attuned to the way identity is performed today. Outsiders is filled with stories that demand attention, stories of people whose search for identity has cast them to the margins. Their stories reveal that we need to refresh our vision of civil rights. Taking its cue from religious discrimination law, Outsiders proposes two major changes to civil rights law. The first is a right to personality. Identity comes from within. The goal of civil rights law should be to take people as they come, to let each of us determine who we are and how we relate to the world around us. The second change is a shift in how the law responds to discrimination. The critical question driving equality law should be whether there is space to accommodate a person's identity. Accommodations are about respecting difference, not erasing it. Accommodations are a way to bring outsiders in. Outsiders seeks to change the way we think about identity, equality, and discrimination. It argues that difference, not sameness, should be the cornerstone of civil rights. Mixing doctrine and theory, art, and personal narrative, Outsiders proposes a civil rights for everyone. Being different is universal. We are all outsiders.

With increasing digitalization and the evolution of artificial intelligence, the legal profession is on the verge of being transformed by technology (legal tech). This handbook examines these developments and the changing legal landscape by providing perspectives from multiple interested parties, including practitioners, academics, and legal tech companies from different legal systems. Scrutinizing the real implications posed by legal tech, the book advocates for an unbiased, cautious approach for the engagement of technology in legal practice. It also carefully addresses the core question of how to balance fears of industry takeover by technology with the potential for using legal tech to expand services and create value for clients. Together, the chapters develop a framework for analyzing the costs and benefits of new technologies before they are implemented in legal practice. This interdisciplinary collection features contributions from lawyers, social scientists, institutional officials, technologists, and current developers of e-law platforms and services.

Since classical antiquity debates about tyranny, tyrannicide and preventing tyranny's re-emergence have permeated governance discourse. Yet within the literature on the global legal order, tyranny is missing. This book creates a taxonomy of tyranny and poses the question: could the global legal order be tyrannical? This taxonomy examines the benefits attached to tyrannical governance for the tyrant, considers how illegitimacy and fear establish tyranny, asks how rule by law, silence and beneficence aid in governing a tyranny. It outlines the modalities of tyranny: scale, imperialism, gender, and bureaucracy. Where it is determined that a tyranny exists, the book examines the extent of the right and duty to effect tyrannicide. As the global legal order gathers ever more power to itself, it becomes imperative to ask whether tyranny lurks at the global scale.

Law and History contains a broad range of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers. Largely theoretical in focus, the volume covers a broad range of issues, including discussions of norms in medieval England, the works of Montesquieu, Maine, and Weber, and of the nature of legal argument in nineteenth-century England, and in twentieth- century war crimes trials.

Common-law judgments tend to be more than merely judgments, for judges often make pronouncements that they need not have made had they kept strictly to the task in hand. Why do they do this? The Intricacies of Dicta and Dissent examines two such types of pronouncement, obiter dicta and dissenting opinions, primarily as aspects of English case law. Neil Duxbury shows that both of these phenomena have complex histories, have been put to a variety of uses, and are not amenable to being straightforwardly categorized as secondary sources of law. This innovative and unusual study casts new light on - and will prompt lawyers to pose fresh questions about - the common law tradition and the nature of judicial decision-making.

This volume includes chapters from an exciting group of scholars at the cutting edge of their fields to present a multi-disciplinary look at how international law shapes behavior. Contributors present overviews of the progress established fields have made in analyzing questions of interest, as well as speculations on the questions or insights that emerging methods might raise. In some chapters, there is a focus on how a particular method might raise or help answer questions, while others focus on a particular international law topic by drawing from a variety of fields through a multi-method approach to highlight how these fields may come together in a single project. Still others use behavioral insights as a form of critique to highlight the blind spots and related mistakes in more traditional analyses of the law. Throughout this volume, authors present creative, insightful, challenges to traditional international law scholarship.

This groundbreaking work offers a first-of-its-kind overview of legal informatics, the academic discipline underlying the technological transformation and economics of the legal industry. Edited by Daniel Martin Katz, Ron Dolin, and Michael J. Bommarito, and featuring contributions from more than two dozen academic and industry experts, chapters cover the history and principles of legal informatics and background technical concepts - including natural language processing and distributed ledger technology. The volume also presents real-world case studies that offer important insights into document review, due diligence, compliance, case prediction, billing, negotiation and settlement, contracting, patent management, legal research, and online dispute resolution. Written for both technical and non-technical readers, Legal Informatics is the ideal resource for anyone interested in identifying, understanding, and executing opportunities in this exciting field.

The United Nations estimates that four billion people worldwide live outside the protection of the law. These people can be driven from their land, intimidated by violence, and excluded from society. This book is about community paralegals - sometimes called barefoot lawyers - who demystify law and empower people to advocate for themselves. These paralegals date back to 1950s South Africa and are active today in many countries, but their role has largely been ignored by researchers. Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice is the first book on the subject. Focusing on paralegal movements in six countries, Vivek Maru, Varun Gauri, and their coauthors have collected rich, vivid stories of paralegals helping people to take on injustice, from domestic violence to unlawful mining to denial of wages. From these stories emerges evidence of what works and how. The insights in the book will be of immense value in the global fight for universal justice. This title is also available as Open Access.

Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, Unaccompanied young migrants explores in-depth the journeys migrant youths take through the UK legal and care systems. Arriving with little agency, what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen? Through international studies and crucially the voices of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narratives they present and the frameworks of culture and legislation into which they are placed. It challenges existing policy and questions, from a social justice perspective, what the treatment of this group tells us about our systems and the cultural presuppositions on which they depend.

As a result of globalization, cross-border transactions and litigation, and multilingual legislation, outsourcing legal translation has become common practice. Unfortunately, over-reliance on such outsourcing has given rise to significant dangers, including information asymmetry, goal divergence, and risk. Legal Translation Outsourced provides the only current reference on commercial legal translation performed outside institutions. Juliette Scott casts a critical eye on the practice as it now stands, offering an analysis of key risks and constraints. Her work is informed by empirical data of the legal translation outsourcing markets of 41 countries. Scott proposes original theoretical models aimed both at training legal translators and informing all stakeholders, including principals and agents. These include models of legal translation performance; a classification of constraints on legal translation applying upstream, during and downstream of translation work; and a description of the complex chain of supply. Working to improve the enterprise itself, Scott shows how implementing a comprehensive legal translation brief-a sorely needed template-can significantly benefit clients by increasing the fitness of translated texts. Further, she opens a number of avenues for future research with an eye to translator empowerment and professionalization.