Skip to main content

More Party Talk: Answers to Everyday Legal Questions for Texas Lawyers

By
All lawyers have experienced some version of the following scenario: You’re at a party (or family gathering or even the grocery store!) and someone finds out you are an attorney.  The person wants advice about their child custody dispute or whether they can be fired in a certain circumstance.  Even though you are a real estate attorney, they expect you to know the exact answer to the question because, after all, you are a lawyer and you are supposed to know “the law.”  All lawyers understand that they can’t possibly know all of the law, it changes all the time, and the answer usually depends on a variety of different factors, but that’s not the answer the man eagerly staring at you in the produce section is looking for!  Enter, More Party Talk: Answers to Everyday Legal Questions for Texas Lawyers, a book published by the State Bar of Texas to help lawyers facing this scenario.

A companion to the earlier edition entitled Party Talk, this book covers questions in nine different subject areas that lawyers are likely to encounter in social situations, such as debt and collections law, criminal law, employment law, probate law, and family law.  Each issue starts with a hypothetical question and provides a one to four paragraph explanation of the matter with a model answer attorneys can use on the fly.  Written by 27 Texas attorneys, the explanations get straight to the point about what information can be reliably provided when faced with an unexpected legal inquiry.

This book is available in the UH Law Library at KFT1281.P37. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

By Anonymous
“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...
Post a Comment
Read more