Robert Ambrogi writes, "Academic Innovation Hits the Legal Web," for Law Technology News, a Law.com publication.
Law schools have long been innovators online. It was at a law school, after all, that the first Web browser was developed for Microsoft's Windows. To begin to list some of these trailblazers would simply exclude too many others.
Recent projects launched online with the support of law schools show that there is no waning of clever and useful ideas coming from law students and faculty. Here are some examples:
And:
Life after exoneration. A new blog, Life After Innocence, serves as the online home of the Life After Innocence Project at Loyola University Chicago. It provides law students with the opportunity to offer guidance and legal assistance to recent exonerees.
Laura Caldwell, a Loyola law alumna and distinguished scholar in residence, leads the practicum. Caldwell, also a successful novelist, worked as a civil attorney when she became involved in the pro bono case of a 19-year-old suspect who was forced into a murder confession and imprisoned in a Cook County holding cell for six years without a trial.
Caldwell and criminal defense lawyer Catherine O'Daniel eventually won a not-guilty verdict for their client.
The project at Loyola will work with clients like Caldwell's who have been exonerated after serving time in a county jail, or those who have spent time in a penitentiary before having their convictions overturned.
I'll add Life After Innocence to the Innocence Project & Resources webroll in the left-column. It's not to be confused with the California-based Life After Exoneration program.
I also want to highlight another site referenced in Ambrogi's article:
Open-access law journal. Harvard University Press recently launched the Journal of Legal Analysis an open-access law journal published in cooperation with the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School. JLA's editors say their plan is to publish "the best legal scholarship from all disciplinary perspectives and in all styles, whether verbal, formal, or empirical." Articles are faculty-edited and subject to peer review.
By describing itself as an open-access journal, the JLA is promising to maintain immediate and no-cost access to its articles via the Web. Once a year, articles published online will be gathered into bound volumes and made available for purchase. The JLA's editor-in-chief is Harvard law professor J. Mark Ramseyer.
The debut issue included an article that argues that raising judicial salaries would do nothing to improve judicial performance. Another contended that judges should be deferential in reviewing class action settlements. The articles all were written by well-known names from the world of legal academia.
Thanks to Eric Freedman for circulating.
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