Legal Writing Prof Blog

ABA Legal Skills Conference

The American Bar Association Governmental and Public Sector Lawyers Division will hold  a Legal Skills Conference on October 26, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

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Deciphering Legal Abbreviations: The Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations

Here's a helpful tool to help you decipher unfamiliar or obscure abbreviations of legal reporters and journals.

The Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations allows you to search for the meaning of abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering international and comparative law. Many major foreign language law publications are also included in the database.

The database mainly covers law reports and legal periodicals but some other legal publications are also included. The Index is under continuous development with new abbreviations and titles being added on a regular basis.

Click here to have a look.

Hat tip to the law librarians at Yale Law School.

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LWI One-Day Workshops

The Legal Writing Institute will again host one-day workshops around the country in late November and December. A list of locations and dates can be found by clicking here, with information on how to be a presenter.

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Michael Murray Joins the Writing Faculty at the University of Kentucky College of Law

Professor Michael D. Murray has joined the full-time legal research and writing faculty University of Kentucky College of Law in Lexington. He had been a Visiting Professor of Law at UK Law in 2016-2017, when he taught Legal Writing, Professional Responsibility, and Advanced Legal Research and Writing. 

Professor Murray graduated from Loyola College in Maryland and from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He was a member of a national champion Jessup International Law Moot Court team at Columbia, and Notes Editor of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.  After law school, Mike clerked for U.S. District Judge John F. Nangle of the Eastern District of Missouri, who was then the Chair of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.  He also practiced commercial, intellectual property, and products liability litigation for seven years at Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis. 

After leaving private practice, Professor Murray taught at the law schools of Saint Louis University, University of Illinois, Valparaiso University, University of Michigan, and University of Massachusetts, and internationally in Italy and the United Kingdom. He currently has published 27 books and numerous law review articles on advocacy, legal research and writing, rhetoric, copyright, art law, right of publicity, and other topics.

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Finding Unpublished Decisions of the Illinois Appellate Court

Do you need to find unpublished decisions of the Illinois Appellate Court? The archives of the Louis L. Biro Law Library at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago contain the largest collection of unpublished Illinois Appellate Court Opinions available. John Marshall's collection spans nearly 350 legal-size volumes dating from about 1900 to 1975. Copies of unpublished decisions may also be found at the Cook County Law Library.

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