Law Commons^™

A Third Semester Of Lrw: Why Teaching Transactional Skills And Problems Is Now Essential To The Legal Writing Curriculum, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The article advocates including drafting and transactional courses in Legal Writing programs to better prepare students for practice. The article also advocates teaching various upper level skills courses so that students learn "soft skills," such as dealing with clients and understanding their personal legal needs.

125 Years Of Law Books, 1888-2013, Keith Ann Stiverson

125th Anniversary Materials

No abstract provided.

"When Numbers Get Serious:" A Study Of Plain English Usage In Briefs Filed Before The New York Court Of Appeals, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Across The Curriculum: Integrating Transactional Skills Instruction, Jean M. Whitney, Lori D. Johnson, Richard A. Rawson

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing: A Doctrinal Course, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Legal writing instruction in American law schools has come a long way. Although scattered experiential courses and co-curricular activities have existed since legal education moved into a university setting, the modern era of skills education began in the 1950s and 1960s, with the creation of live-client clinics at many law schools. Early legal writing programs soon followed, moving into the main stream of curricular reform during the 1980s and 1990s. As these new courses and new instructors moved into the academy, the language of legal education naturally changed. Law faculties found themselves wanting to describe these new additions to the …

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs' Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Publications

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiffs' lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs' briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for win-loss rate, bad plaintiffs' briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling. In a major legal service market, how …

The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Lynnise Pantin. I teach at New York Law School, and my talk today focuses on integrating transactional skills into the first-year curriculum.

As a first premise, the law school curriculum is dominated by litigation oriented skills, and I can argue that there is a litigation bias that is pervasive in legal education. I am hoping that, by engaging with those of you who teach first year students, we can start to talk about creating and developing transactional skills within a context that is already there in the first-year curriculum.