Guest Post by Steven A. Mitchell: History & Language in Practice
I am happy to share this guest post by Steven A. Mitchell, a law library faculty member at the Notre Dame Law School. It’s about an amazing new course that Steven has designed and is teaching this spring at Notre Dame. As the courts increasingly rely on arguments from historical and linguistic sources, I expect courses like the one Steven is teaching will start becoming more widespread.
* * *
One of the delights of being a Research and Instruction Librarian at Notre Dame Law School is having the opportunity to teach legal research courses. In the fall semester, we research librarians — all of whom have both a J.D. and a Masters in Library Science — teach a section or two of 1L students on fundamental principles of legal research. Students learn about the nature of legal information and how to find it, gain experience working with legal databases, and begin to adjust the way they think about research to suit the particular demands of the practice of law.
Then in the spring semester, each librarian teaches a smaller Advanced Legal Research (ALR) elective to 2L and 3L students. Whereas the curriculum for the 1L course is the same across every section, one feature of the ALR courses is they each focus on a particular subject in legal research, building on the foundation of the 1L course (and a summer or two of practice experience) and allowing students to dig deeper into a topic of personal or professional interest. At Notre Dame, recent ALR topics have included: federal law; state and local law; tax law; transactional law; legal analytics; free internet resources; and administrative law.
This spring I am excited to be introducing a new Advanced Legal Research course entitled History & Language in Practice. It is not just a new course at Notre Dame, but it may very well be the first course on this topic at any American law school. To quote the blurb for the course:
In recent decades, judges have taken an increased interest in incorporating interdisciplinary research into their legal decision-making process. This course introduces students to the research sources and methodologies of two areas which have become particularly important with the increased influence of originalism: history and language. Through exercises, research projects, and discussions of readings, students will learn how to critically address the pragmatic and theoretical questi
Article from Reason.com
