NLADA Partnering with ACS to Promote ACS ResearchLink

The American Constitution Society offers ACS ResearchLink, an innovative on-line resource for the legal community. NLADA is partnering with ACS to promote the continued development of ACS ResearchLink, so that this project can grow and leverage previously untapped resources to generate and share new ideas about important legal issues.

ACS ResearchLink collects legal research topics submitted by practitioners for law students to explore in faculty-supervised writing projects for academic credit. Topic authors will receive a copy of the resulting student papers, which ACS will also post in a searchable online library. By connecting law students and faculty with the research needs of advocates, ACS ResearchLink will become an increasingly comprehensive and powerful engine for change, while also enhancing the relevance and influence of student academic scholarship.

Please note that topics must:

• Invite legal analysis;

• Be sufficiently complex to justify academic credit for a journal, law review, seminar, or dissertation-style paper;

• Require at least 20-pages to sufficiently address;

• Address issues of broad impact, that are relevant beyond a specific case or fact pattern; and

• Pose important questions that are not urgent - topics to which you do not need an answer right away.

Think about legal questions you routinely encounter or would like to raise if you had a briefing paper, rather than issues you need to address, for example, to prepare a particular upcoming filing.

For example, rather than ask for a 50-state survey of a legal issue, invite students to identify a smaller number of states with different approaches to the issue, analyze the effectiveness of each regime, and identify best practices. Or, instead of asking whether testimony can be compelled based on a unique fact pattern, request a paper on whether compelling testimony is ever permissible for a certain class of witnesses. You can browse topics already submitted by practitioners here.

Students will be working on an academic calendar. As a result, they will typically seek topics at the beginning of each semester - in August and September to be completed by December, and then again in January and February to be completed by May.