Lawyering Process Recent and Forthcoming Scholarship
This year the Lawyering Process faculty at Boyd are grateful for our close-knit community and our amazing colleagues, and we are grateful that even with the recent tragedy on our campus, we have so much to celebrate. For starters, on December 2, 2023, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Boyd’s founding! In February 2023, we celebrated our colleagues from around the country as we hosted the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference. In April 2023, we celebrated Lori Johnson, when she was awarded tenure and promoted to Professor of Law! Finally, in August 2023 we celebrated Nantiya Ruan as she joined our faculty as a tenured Professor of Law.
Of course, we also celebrate the many accomplishments of our wonderful Lawyering Process faculty:
Professor Kathryn Stanchi
Kathy Stanchi's recently published chapter, Women In Justice Kennedy's Jurisprudence,” is now part of an award-winning book. The Rhetoric of Judging Well: The Conflicted Legacy of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (Penn State 2023) was awarded the Distinguished Publication Award by the Communication and Law Section of the National Communication Association (NCA).
Professor Stanchi was elected to membership in the NOVA Argumentation Knowledge Centre, an international collaboration of rhetoric and legal argumentation scholars run out of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. In October, she presented a paper entitled "Rhetoric and Legal Argumentation" to 160 lawyers and law professors from around the world at the Legal Argumentation Conference at the Morais Leitão Law Firm in Lisbon, Portugal.
Professor Stanchi also published a new paper, “The Rhetoric of Rape Through the Lens of Commonwealth v. Berkowitz,” which will be published in the forthcoming special issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. The paper was excerpted in a volume entitled "Talking About Black Lives Matter and #MeToo" published by UC Irvine Press and was also used as part of a NYC Bar Association CLE about unlearning white supremacy culture called "Recognizing the Inherent Bias Within the Legal Profession."
Professor Kristin Gerdy Kyle
Kristin Gerdy Kyle is at Boyd Law for a second year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Lawyering Process. Kristin‘s almost three decades of teaching and scholarly experience, and her love for and dedication to her students, make her a welcome addition to the Boyd Legal Writing family. Kristin’s most recent article focuses on the use of literary allusions in judicial opinions; it was published in the University of Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal. Kristin is currently working on an article focusing on how lawyers use names and descriptions of various parties; she is exploring the insights lawyers can gain from psycholinguistics and other linguistic theories. Kristin is a member of the Sirico Scholars’ Workshop Governing Board and was recently named Administrative Coordinator of the Workshop. She is also the Chair of the 2024 J. Reuben Clark Law Society International Conference, which will be held in Las Vegas in March 2024.
Professor Nantiya Ruan
Nantiya Ruan joined Boyd Law this academic year as a Professor of Law and has found a deep, profound sense of gratitude and belonging. Her students appreciate her experiential style and public interest focus. Her scholarship remains focused on workplace fairness and collective rights. Her latest article explores Racial Pay Equity and was published this spring in the Brooklyn Law Review. She also contributed to the Creighton Law Review symposium on Professor McMurtry-Chubb’s book, writing on racial justice and work hierarchies. She remains the Book Review Editor for LC&R: JALWD and an Editor in Chief on the leading treatise on the Fair Labor Standards Act for Bloomberg. Nantiya participates in the leadership of the LW Professors of Color Scholarship Group, Writing as Resistance (WAR) and the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Scholarship Group (RMLWSG). Her upcoming work focuses on Gender Pay Equity in Higher Education and Teaching Tolerance in the Conspiracy of Silence.
Professor Rebecca Scharf
Rebecca Scharf has spent the last year focusing on issues of mindfulness and professional identity formation and incorporating them into her classroom. She serves on the Executive Board of the AALS Section on Balance and Well Being, Co-Chairing the Awards Committee. As part of this work, she presented on professional identity formation at several workshops and conferences, including the fabulous Central States Regional Legal Writing conference held at Drake University. She also serves as an elected member of the university Faculty Senate. She is a member of the ALWD Leadership and Development Committee. Rebecca continues to write on issues of Privacy and Technology. Her current scholarly project, Drones, Privacy, and Feminism, focuses on how features of drone technology allow it to take advantage of ways privacy protection has traditionally been - and continues to be – gendered. Moreover, it addresses the importance of addressing broader inequities that can go unseen when technology is viewed without social context.
Professor Lori Johnson
In May, Lori Johnson was awarded Boyd's Faculty Member of the Year Award, which sits on her shelf just behind the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Award she received at the 21st annual Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference in February. Earlier in the year, Lori chaired the AALS LWRR Section's programming and membership meeting at the Annual Meeting in San Diego. She continues to serve on the Executive Board of the LWRR Section as the Immediate Past Chair. She also continues her service on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, which published its phenomenal 27th Volume in March.
Despite teaching nearly 200 students over the past two semesters in both Lawyering Process and Business Organizations, Lori continues her work for LexisNexis on her co-authored update (with Benjamin Edwards) to the Nevada Corporate Law treatise. In October she published a short article in the Nevada Lawyer about her approach to educating first generation law students, a topic on which she will present in January for the AALS Teaching Methods Section. To round out her year of winning, she and her team won the Boyd Law Alumni Tacos & Trivia contest in July, and she and her family won the Boyd Student Bar Association Faculty Costume Contest on Halloween. Lastly, she remains immensely grateful for the mentors and collaborators from all around our discipline who were instrumental in helping her achieve her goal of tenure and promotion to full equity Professor of Law, which was awarded in July.
Professor Joe Regalia
Joe Regalia continues to spend more time with ChatGPT than he does any human (aside from his wife). Earlier this year, he published two short articles with the Nevada Lawyer exploring how generative AI may change legal education in the coming years. He is hard at work on three law review articles slated to publish in Spring 2024. From Briefs to Bytes explores the many ways that generative AI is already being used by practitioners in their writing and everyday practice, with tips for ethically and effectively navigating this new technology. The GAI Law Review explores ways that generative AI is opening up new possibilities for legal scholarship, including empirical and other legal academic work. And Should GAI be Required Reading for Lawyers? explores not just ethical competency issues surrounding generative AI, but also the aspirational skills practitioners and law students should be aiming for in this area. Joe is excited about his upcoming book with Aspen: Level Up Your Legal Writing—scheduled to debut in Fall 2024. Level Up encourages law students to holistically weave technology and process improvement into their legal writing, sharing hundreds of examples and models along the way. He enjoyed giving presentations at AALS, William & Mary, and the LWI one-day workshop on December 2. Joe also keeps busy with his work as an advisor to the eLearning company he co-founded, Write.law—along with leading technology and legal writing workshops for federal agencies, law firms, in-house teams, state bars, federal and state courts, nonprofits, legal aid organizations, and other groups.
Professor Mary Beth Beazley
In January and May, Mary Beth Beazley celebrated getting her grades in – just at the wire, as always. In 2022, she celebrated the publication of the sixth edition of A Practical Guide to Appellate Advocacy, though that made her feel a little bit old. She’s currently surveying legal writing faculty for an upcoming article on law faculty voting rights.
Mary Beth has made several presentations over the past year, many for the National Judicial College (whose faculty she joined in 2018). She has spoken to law clerks and appellate judges in three state capitals: Carson City in December of ’22, Lincoln in April of ’23, and Indianapolis in November of ’23. She also served as a faculty member in the Judicial College’s course on judicial writing in both April and September. Also in September, she presented “The Cynic’s Guide to Legal Writing” in Baltimore to attorneys who work for the Association of Flight Attendants. Last fall, Mary Beth did an Aspen Authors presentation on how she uses formulas in the teaching of legal writing. It’s available on YouTube, and she reports that is has even received some downloads.
In December, Mary Beth spoke on Opinion Design as a panelist at the first annual Judicial Writing “Showcase of Ideas,” sponsored by Thomas R. Kline Center for Judicial Education at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University. Finally, Mary Beth, Kathy Stanchi, and Nantiya Ruan were co-presenters at the LWI one-day workshop on December 1.