Seminar given to first year LLB students, CUHK, September 2016

1. Legal reading, research, writing
Paul Maharg
The Australian National University
Slides @ paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
• Reading, memory, maps and music
• Organising your research
• Academic legal writing – what matters?
• Slides available at: http://paulmaharg.com/slides

4. Dewey: 1916/2016
Reflective learning – the relationship between
experience and thinking – is characterised as:
‘(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an
incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural
anticipation—a tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a
tendency to affect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination,
inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration which will define and
clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis
to make it more precise and more consistent; (v) taking one stand upon the project
hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing
something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, thereby testing the
hypothesis.’ (Dewey 1916, 150)

5. 1. The rhetoric of reading
What is everywhere passes unnoticed. Nothing is more commonplace
than the experience of reading, and nothing is less well known. Reading
is taken for granted to such an extent that at first glance it seems nothing
need be said about it.
(Todorov, 1978, p. 39).

6. Q: When you wake in the night, how do you know
what to reach for and where, when you can’t see in the
darkness?
A: The parietal lobe in our brain forms and reforms
many different virtual maps of our current location,
centred on parts of our body or the space around our
body. When you change position in bed, the map shifts
with you.
memory, maps and reading

7. Yes, if we bear in mind the research on
•How we read texts
•How we understand maps and our positions in the
real world
•How we read music
can we adapt this for reading law?

8. strategies for reading …
What I said to my adult learners:
•Read forward – no recursive reading
•Listen to your expectations for word clusters
•Be aware of context’s effect on meaning
•Cope with loss of power & agency while you’re reading
•Form good habits and discipline

9. Panmure Lute MSS (c.1632), 5, no.3.
Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

10. Strategies for reading music…
What my lute tutor said to me:
•Read forward – no recursive reading
•Listen to your harmonic expectations
•Be aware of context
•Cope with playing and expression while
sight-reading music
•Form good habits and discipline

11. strategies for reading law
(what I told myself)

12. the transitive power
of music notation…
Panmure Lute MS (c.1632), 5, no.3.
Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

13. Narrative event diagram, Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer
… could be used as simulation notation

14. Narrative event diagram: Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer and Defender (Gould et al 2009)

15. Compare lute tablature across two staves
with simulation notation

16. what works:
making notes from your reading
Wylie Lochhead v Mitchell
1870 8 M 552
A. Contracted to build for B. a hearse for a sum, on
condition that B. should contribute certain
portions of materials and workmanship. B. did so
– and materials from were fixed to the hearse so
that they could not be detached without injury to
it. A. became bankrupt before finishing the hearse
which was in his posssession.
Question in law: in a dispute between B. and the
trustee in A.’s sequestration, who owned the
hearse?
Held: that the parties were joint proprietors of the
subject in proportion to the value of their respective
contributions.
This illustrates the principle of equity. Where
material, skill or labour of 2 or more are involved to
produce a corporeal indivisible object, they each have
a claim regarding their individual contribution.

17. • Authors: Dorothy Deegan, James Stratman, Leah
Christensen
• Having a purpose for reading is essential – pick a role
to read the text from, eg one of the parties in a case.
what works:
legal reading research on purpose

18. Abstract
With an increasing amount of time spent reading electronic documents, a screen-
based reading behavior is emerging. The screen-based reading behavior is
characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-
time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent
on in-depth reading, and concentrated reading. Decreasing sustained attention is also
noted. Annotating and highlighting while reading is a common activity in the printed
environment. However, this “traditional” pattern has not yet migrated to the
digitalenvironment when people read electronic documents. (Liu 2005)
•Digital streaming is also changing the way we listen to music…
what works:
digital reading

19. 2. Organising your legal research

20. • Zotero
• ReadCube
what works: use citation managers

21. 2. Academic legal writing

22. essay writing
• Forms of writing
• Strategies
• Planning
• Discursive writing
• Introductions
• Problem-solving writing

23. forms of writing
WRITING
Structured argument Types of writing
Boundaries Writing processes
- Time - Planning
- Word limit - Strategies
- Subject - Monitoring
- Purpose
1. Discursive essay
2. Problem-solving essay

24. strategies for reducing constraints
• Throw a constraint away
• Partition the problem
• Set priorities and ‘satisfice’
• Draw on a routine or learned procedure
• Plan...

25. planning
• Brainstorming
• Content plans?
• Method plans
• Improvisation
– longhand prose?
– Notes?
– Diagrams?
– Graphics?

26. questions to ask about discursive writing
• Do I agree with the question?
– Disagree with it?
– Agree with bits of it?
• Are there any terms in it I want to define?
• What structure does the question give to my notes?
• What headings can I break this structuredown to?

27. introductions to essays
You can:
• Refer to the demands of the question
– to show you’re being relevant
• Discuss the terms of the question
– that you maybe want to define for yourself
• Question the question
– if you don’t agree with any assumptions it makes
• Summarise what you say in the essay
• Outline what you are going to analyse in the essay

28. problem-solving writing
• Define area of law
– … and identify if you need to define terms
in it relevant to the problem
• Establish the rights of the parties
– … both parties!
• Identify the option(s)
• Decide on the solution(s).

29. Dewey, J. (1916/2011). Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education. Simon & Brown, New York.
Liu, Z. (2005). Reading behaviour in the digital environment. Changes in reading behaviour over
the past 10 years. Journal of Documentation. 61, 6, 700-12.
Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early
Twenty-first Century. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, Surrey.
Todorov, T. (1978) Genres in Discourse, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
references

30. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides