Guidelines for Fieldwork Report

Format: 12 point font (Times Roman), one-inch margins (on top, bottom, left and right), double-spaced text, single-spaced footnotes. (Please use footnotes, not end notes.) Follow Blue Book for citations with text and in footnotes. There is no minimum number of footnotes or citations. Your writing should be of the same finished quality as would be expected of an appellate brief or law review note. Citations should be complete and correct. The grade may be reduced for persistent spelling errors, typographical errors, or other evidence of sloppiness. Attach your complete Activity Report showing all time expended on fieldwork up to the date of your report.

Length: 7 page minimum (not counting attached activity report); no maximum page limit.

Due: Monday, November 7 by 5pm (submit as a text file attachment to email). Absent good cause for lateness, the grade will be reduced by the equivalent of one letter grade (e.g. from a B to a C) for each 24 hour the paper is late, measured from 5:01 pm on November 7. For example a report turned in at 5:01pm on November 7 will have the grade reduced by one letter grade; the same report turned in at 5:01pm on November 8 will be reduced by 2 letter grades.)

Grading: The fieldwork report will count as 20% of the total course grade. (The final report will count as 40% of the course grade).

The report should include a description of your methodology, including any modifications you may have made as a result of obstacles or new issues that you encountered in the course of your fieldwork. The report should also provide a summary description of what you learned in the course of your fieldwork that will provide the basis for your final report (which will be either a proposal to improve an unaddressed problem or an analysis of an attempt to improve one or more identified problems). A good discussion of quantitative and qualitative research methods is found in Feeley, pp 123-27 and 147-53. You may find a useful model in Feeley's analysis of the "myth of heavy caseloads" (Chapter 8) in which he combined quantitative research of case data (pp. 247-49) with qualitative courtroom observation (pp. 258-61).