Law is best interpreted in the context of the traditions and cultures that have shaped its development, implementation, and acceptance. However, these can never be assessed truly objectively: individual interpreters of legal theory need to reflect on how their own experiences create the framework within which they understand legal concepts. Theory is not separate from practice, but one kind of practice. It is rooted in the world, even if it is not grounded by it. In this highly original volume, Allan C. Hutchinson takes up the challenge of self-reflection about how his upbringing, education, and scholarship contributed to his legal insights and analysis. Through this honest examination of key episodes in his own life and work, Hutchinson produces unique interpretations of fundamental legal concepts. This book is required reading for every lawyer or legal scholar who wants to analyse critically where he or she stands when they practice and study law.

Hardly known twenty years ago, exclusion from public space has today become a standard tool of state intervention. Every year, tens of thousands of homeless individuals, drug addicts, teenagers, protesters and others are banned from parts of public space. The rise of exclusion measures is characteristic of two broader developments that have profoundly transformed public space in recent years: the privatisation of public space, and its increased control in the 'security society'. Despite the fundamental problems it raises, exclusion from public space has received hardly any attention from legal scholars. This book addresses this gap and comprehensively explores the implications that this new form of intervention has for the constitutional essentials of liberal democracy: the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democracy. To do so, it analyses legal developments in three liberal democracies that have been at the forefront of promoting exclusion measures: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland.

The First Amendment rights of lawyers are ethereal. Most lawyers fail to realize that courts may deny them access to the First Amendment's protective shield in many regulatory and disciplinary contexts. Overall, attorneys cannot and should not assume that they can obtain First Amendment protection - especially when acting as an attorney in their role as an 'officer of the court'. Yet, it is precisely in the lawyering context - where attorneys engage in speech, association, and petitioning for the very purpose of securing client rights, invoking law, enabling the judicial power, and obtaining justice - that the need for First Amendment protection is the most acute. If regulators silence that voice, they silence justice. From overarching theory to specific real-world contexts, this illuminating book provides a critical resource for lawyers, judges, and scholars to understand the relationship between the First Amendment rights of lawyers and the integrity of the justice system.

Questions of the application and interpretation of the ne bis in idem principle in EU law continue to surface in the case law of different European courts. The primary purpose of this book is to provide guidance and to address important issues in connection with the ne bis in idem principle in EU law. The development of the ne bis in idem principle in the EU legal order illustrates the difficulty of reconciling pluralism with the need for doctrinal coherence, and highlights the tensions between the requirements of effectiveness and the protection of fundamental rights in EU law. The ne bis in idem principle is a 'litmus test' of fundamental rights protection in the EU. This book explores the principle, and the way the Court of Justice of the European Union has interpreted it, in the context of competition law and the areas of freedom, security and justice, human rights law and tax law.

Law is a varied, powerful, and highly rewarding profession. Studies show, however, that lawyers have higher rates of alcoholism, divorce, and even suicide than the general population. Stress creates these poor outcomes, including the stress of dealing with other people's problems all day, the stress of spending excessive amounts of time at work, and the stress of being disconnected to what is most meaningful in life. Through mindfulness and emotional intelligence training, lawyers can improve focus, get more work done in less time, improve their interpersonal skills, and seek and find work that will make their lives more meaningful. This book is designed to help law students and lawyers of all experience levels find a sustainable and meaningful life in the field of law. This book includes journaling and other interactive exercises that can help lawyers find peace, focus, meaning, and happiness over a lifetime of practicing law.

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?

For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States. This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms. In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system.

It has long been recognized that court trials in the common law system, both criminal and civil, operate around pairs of competing narratives told by opposing advocates. In recent years, however, it has increasingly been argued that narrative flows in many directions and through every form of legal theory and practice. Interest in the part played by metaphor in the law, including metaphors for the law, and for many standard concepts in legal practice, has also been strong, though research under the metaphor banner has been much more fragmentary. In this book, for the first time, a distinguished group of legal scholars, collaborating with specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism, explore how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. Together, they examine topics including concepts of law, legal persuasion, human rights law, gender in the law, innovations in legal thinking, legal activism, creative work around the law, and public debate around crime and punishment.

Becoming a Lawyer: Success at Law School 3rd edition edition (formerly known as Surviving Law School), provides practical, experience-based advice for students studying or considering studying law. The text offers insight into the unique elements of law school culture: letting students know what to expect and what is expected of them throughout their law degree.
With a focus on graduate attributes and learning outcomes, this comprehensive guide gives students the confidence and skills to succeed in law school and beyond.

Law is best interpreted in the context of the traditions and cultures that have shaped its development, implementation, and acceptance. However, these can never be assessed truly objectively: individual interpreters of legal theory need to reflect on how their own experiences create the framework within which they understand legal concepts. Theory is not separate from practice, but one kind of practice. It is rooted in the world, even if it is not grounded by it. In this highly original volume, Allan C. Hutchinson takes up the challenge of self-reflection about how his upbringing, education, and scholarship contributed to his legal insights and analysis. Through this honest examination of key episodes in his own life and work, Hutchinson produces unique interpretations of fundamental legal concepts. This book is required reading for every lawyer or legal scholar who wants to analyse critically where he or she stands when they practice and study law.

In this groundbreaking book, Randall Kiser presents a multi-disciplinary, practice-based introduction to the major soft skills for lawyers: self-awareness, self-development, social proficiency, wisdom, leadership, and professionalism. The work serves as both a map and a vehicle for developing the skills essential to self-knowledge and fulfillment, organizational respect and accomplishment, client satisfaction and appreciation, and professional improvement and distinction. It identifies the most important soft skills for attorneys, describes and applies hundreds of studies regarding psychology, law, and soft skills, and provides concrete steps and methods to improve soft skills. The book should be read by law students, attorneys, and anyone else interested in how lawyers should practice law.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) and the law is on the cusp of a revolution that began with text analytic programs like IBM's Watson and Debater and the open-source information management architectures on which they are based. Today, new legal applications are beginning to appear and this book - designed to explain computational processes to non-programmers - describes how they will change the practice of law, specifically by connecting computational models of legal reasoning directly with legal text, generating arguments for and against particular outcomes, predicting outcomes and explaining these predictions with reasons that legal professionals will be able to evaluate for themselves. These legal applications will support conceptual legal information retrieval and allow cognitive computing, enabling a collaboration between humans and computers in which each does what it can do best. Anyone interested in how AI is changing the practice of law should read this illuminating work.

For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States. This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms. In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system.