Law Commons^™

A Better Beginning: Why And How To Help Novice Legal Writers Build A Solid Foundation By Shifting Their Focus From Product To Process, Miriam E. Felsenburg, Laura P. Graham

Miriam E Felsenburg

Several years ago, we set out to discover why early legal writing is so difficult for many beginning law students and what we can do to make it easier. In a prior article, we described several key factors that contributed to student overconfidence and illustrated how this overconfidence impeded students’ progress in both early legal analysis and early legal writing. In this follow-up article, we suggest strategies for better orienting students to law school learning and better managing their goals for legal writing at the beginning of the first-year course.The legal writing classroom is usually the place where students are …