Law Commons^™

Peer Editing: A Comprehensive Pedagogical Approach To Maximize Assessment Opportunities, Integrate Collaborative Learning, And Achieve Desired Outcomes, Cassandra Hill

Cassandra L. Hill

This Article examines an underused teaching strategy—collaborative peer editing—through the lens of student learning outcomes and assessment measures. The American Bar Association (“ABA”) recently proposed sweeping changes to law school accreditation standards that focus less on input measures, such as the school’s facility, faculty size and budget, and more on output measures, such as the school’s bar passage and employment rates. This shift will require law schools—and law professors—to articulate student learning goals and assess their achievement. To do so, law professors must find efficient techniques to assess students’ performance. Peer editing presents such an opportunity.

This Article shows how …

Legal Writing And Other Lawyering Skills, Nancy Schultz, Louis Sirico

Nancy Schultz

No abstract provided.

Making Effective Use Of Practitioners' Briefs In The Law School Curriculum, Anna Hemingway

Anna P. Hemingway

A Practical Guide To Legal Writing And Legal Method, John Dernbach, Richard Singleton, Cathleen Wharton, Joan Ruhtenberg, Catherine Wasson

John C. Dernbach

No abstract provided.

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark E. Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

The Past, Presence, And Future Of Legal Writing Scholarship: Rhetoric, Voice, And Community, Linda L. Berger

Linda L. Berger

This Article welcomes a new generation of legal writing scholars. In the first generation, legal writing professors debated whether they should be engaged in legal scholarship at all. In the second generation, assuming that they should be engaged in scholarship, legal writing professors discerned and defined different genres of and topics for the scholarship in which some or all of us were or should be engaged. In this Article, we map the contours of a third generation of legal writing scholarship—one that integrates the elements of our professional lives and engages more effectively with our professional communities. The core of …