Tuesday, September 11, 2007

ACS To Link Academic Research and the Practicing Bar

Via Orly Lobel at PrawfsBlawg:

ACS [American Constitution Society] is pleased to announce the launch of ACS ResearchLink: Connecting Law Students and Lawyers Committed to Justice.

ACS ResearchLink creates a valuable online resource for the legal community by collecting legal research topics submitted by practitioners for law students to explore in faculty-supervised writing projects for academic credit. Practitioners will receive a copy of the resulting student papers, which ACS will post in a searchable online library. Follow these links to search or browse currently available research topics.

To submit a topic for student research, pleas use the ACS ResearchLink topic submission form. Sample topics, which illustrate how research questions may be presented, are available here.

Additional information about ACS ResearchLink is available online, including answers to frequently asked questions. Please contact ResearchLink(at)ACSLaw.org or ACS Associate Director Shahid Buttar at SButtar(at)ACSLaw.org with any additional questions.

2 comments:

Betsy McKenzie said...

Wow! I can't help but wonder if there is any implied warranty to the practitioner or if they are advised to take the research results as a starting place. Are they given the grade assigned to the work done by the student? Is the grader somehow liable if they warrant a project A material and it's seriously deficient research? Call me paranoid....

Betsy McKenzie said...

I looked at the browsable list of topics and note that nearly all the questions are from not-for-profits -- legal services, organizations. That might make it less litigious. Certainly makes it more palatable. Isn't there some bar on law schools taking work from the practicing bar by handling fee-generating cases in clinics? I am guessing that doesn't extend to taking bread from the mouths of paralegals.