Arkansas Law Review

Vol. 70, No.4

Article

Solving Sewer Service: Fighting Fraud with Technology

Adrian Gottshall

Fraudulently obtained default judgments ruin lives. For decades, fraudulent service of process has been wide-spread in high volume court dockets, such as landlord and tenant, debt collection, and small claims matters. Traditional methods of service, which lack reliable verifications, are not reasonably calculated to provide constitutionally adequate notice. The technological advancements that have occurred in the decades following Mullane, pro-vide new and better circumstances under which notice must be provided.

Article

Citation Literacy

Alexa Z. Chew

Citation literacy is the ability to read and write citations. That’s it. The rest of this article will unpack what’s in those ten words and why they matter. Law students are not introduced to legal citations as functional parts of the legal arguments that they spend so much time reading. Instead, legal citations are mostly left out of the arguments they support or, worse, are presented as impediments to understanding legal arguments. Arguably, this viewpoint causes a whole host of non-positive feelings about legal citation among law students and the lawyers they later become.

Article

First-Generation Students in Law School: A Proven Success Model

Jacqueline M. O'Bryant and Katharine Traylor Schaffzin

First-generation college students bring with them to law school both tremendous skills and unique challenges. Theybring with them life experiences, interdependent life skills, and work ethics that position them well to grit and grind their way through the challenges of law school. But they also often lack the social, cultural, and financial capital that more traditional law students utilize in pursuing academic success. As with undergraduate institutions, it would behoove law schools to invest resources to aid first-generation college students matriculating to law school.

Article

Framing Failure in the Legal Classroom: Techniques for Encouraging Growth and Resilience

Kaci Bishop

In law school, a fear of failure can paralyze students and hinder their learning. In part, this resistance to and fear of failure is exacerbated by legal education’s institutional focus on outcomes: grades, class rank, and high-paying jobs. This focus often causes students to be increasingly extrinsically motivated and encourages a “fixed mindset,” which contributes deleteriously to the mental health and intellectual curiosity of some law students. And this fear and shunning of failure does not end in law school. Like other skills that we teach, we can teach our students to react to failure with a “growth mindset” and resilience and help them to engage even when something is difficult.

Article

Originalism’s Claims and Their Implications

André LeDuc

This article explores six of the most fundamental disagreements between originalism and its critics over originalism’s implications. These implications—and the implications of the critics’ alternatives—figure prominently in the arguments advanced in the debate. The exchanges with respect to these claims offer no reason to rehabilitate or even to continue the originalism debate.

Comment

Low-Income Fathers, Adoption, and the Biology Plus Test for Paternal Rights

Lacey Johnson

This Comment purposes to explore ways in which the current “biology plus” test for determining existence of a paternal relationship disproportionately affects lower-income minority fathers who are unlikely to be fully aware of the legal hoops they must jump through to establish paternity.