Law Commons^™

Exploring Anti-Racism In The First Year Legal Writing Classroom, Amanda K. Maus Stephen

Presentations

The Legal Writing Institute hosted a series of one-day workshops at various law schools, including at SU, where the theme of the workshops was "Teaching Values in the Legal Writing Classroom." This presentation explores assignments and activities that legal writing professors can use to introduce and reinforce ant-racism as a critical professional value.

Assessing A Cooperative Writing Process In An Undergraduate Legal Writing Course, James A. Croft

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

I teach legal writing to undergraduate students, and I primarily do so by cooperatively writing with them, using instructional time to work through the students’ writing assignments as a class. I arrived at this process organically over several years. When I first started teaching, I was surprised by the disconnect between my expectations regarding student writing and student performance. To attempt to close that gap, I began going through parts of the research and writing process cooperatively with my students in class, and increasing the amount of work that we did together each semester until, in the semester assessed …

Legal Citations: A Foundation Of Written Advocacy, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

The article advanced this formula for achieving effective appellate advocacy: “First, you seek to persuade the court of the merit of the client’s case, to create an emotional empathy for your position. Then you assist the court to reach a conclusion favorable to the client’s interest in terms of the analysis of the law and the procedural posture of the case.”

Debunking The Efficacy Of Standard Contract Boilerplate: Part V, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

After five installments, we can end our discussion of contract boilerplate. We have slashed the outdated language and emerged as a clear and contemporary legal writer. Be willing to adapt what has worked well in the past because change is the foundation of human ingenuity.

References To Robert Frost's Poetry In Advocacy And Judicial Opinions, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article concerns courts whose written opinions have recently cited and quoted Frost and his poetry. By profiling Frost’s enduring influence, the article fortifies a theme I have presented in earlier “Writing It Right” articles. The theme begins in the courts, which in recent years often accent their opinions’ substantive or procedural rulings by quoting or citing well-known cultural markers from literature, sports, or popular entertainment.

Improved Writing From Reading Other Writers, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In 1954, a 12-year-old junior high school student wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter seeking advice about how to prepare to become a lawyer. “The best way to prepare for the law,” Frankfurter answered, “is to come to the study of law as a well-read person.” Reading other writers, he explained, enables future lawyers to “acquire the capacity to use the English language on paper and in speech and with the habits of clear thinking.”

Justice Frankfurter offered his young correspondent sound advice about the intimate link among reading, writing, and lawyering. Reading works from other writers with an eye toward …

Obergefell V. Hodges—And The Use Of Oral Argument And Storytelling To Reinforce Competencies In The Legal Writing Classroom, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Legal writing professors struggle with trying to balance learning skills with the bigger picture of learning that law is ultimately about having the power to change lives. Often, learning the skills becomes completely separated from the human aspect of the law. Although we all work toward unifying the two concepts, it is not always done by having discussions about the bigger issues, or even having the students look at more traditional sources such as briefs or even law review articles. Oyez and the oral tradition of storytelling presented by radio (or other similar resources) have the potential of more fully …

Guthrie's Guide To Better Legal Writing, 2nd Ed, Hannah Steeves

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The second edition of Guthrie’s Guide to Better Legal Writing is Neil Guthrie’s revised anthology of email queries and blog posts. The scope of the book is in its title: it offers practical tips and advice to legal writers. Guthrie’s definition of “legal writing” addresses written communication between lawyers, law students, and the layperson, although legal drafting is addressed intermittently. The book is not intended to be a comprehensive review of grammar and punctuation. Instead, it has an approximate agenda that is enhanced by the author’s personal narrative.

The author follows their own advice as outlined in the suggestions for …

Debunking The Efficacy Of Standard Contract Boilerplate: Part Iv, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

We have belabored the archaic and prohibited use of "said" as a synonym for "the." But this paragraph needs more work. First, the phrase "irrespective of the fact that" is wordy and could be replaced with the plain language alternative of "even though." Second, "one or more of the parties now is, or may become, a resident of a different state" also could be streamlined. The phrase is easy enough to understand but cut to the chase. Replacing this phrase with "either party now or later resides in a different state" does the trick.

Swimming With Broad Strokes: Publishing And Presenting Beyond The Lw Discipline, Robin Boyle Laisure, Stephen Paskey

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In our greater skills community, we share ideas, borrow and tweak theories from other disciplines, and create new approaches. It is understandable how our community may expand pedagogy to the brim of legal writing or explore topics outside of the field. Skills professors are, by nature, a creative collective who teach from the heart and enjoy writing and thinking. Our publishing pursuits can be boundless.

Both Authors of this Article share mutual experiences of dipping our toes in a pond beyond the legal writing continent. Our writing experiences have influenced our teaching, bringing these broader perspectives to our legal …

Academic Law Librarians Are Paid 47% Less Than Their Faculty Counterparts, Olivia R. Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Publications

In December Joe Fore, the co-director of the Legal Writing program at the University of Virginia School of Law, posted to Twitter a thread comparing tenure track and legal writing salaries. In comparing four public schools, he discovered that the average starting salary for a tenure track professor was $173,000 while the average salary for all legal writing faculty was $111,000. A few academic law librarians saw the tweet and replied that someone should do the same for law librarians, too.

What Is Scholarly Legal Writing? An Introduction To Different Perspectives (On Us Qualified Immunity Doctrine), Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

How do you write a law article? It turns out there is no one ‘right way’. Legal problems can be analysed from different angles. Law journals are full of diverse perspectives on the law.

This document provides an introduction to the different types of legal scholarship that can be found in law journals. It illustrates using scholarship on the American judicial doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields government officials from legal liability for ‘constitutional torts’. Qualified immunity can be analysed from the perspective of doctrine, policy, comparative law, history, economics, empirics, sociology, and philosophy. One issue; many perspectives.

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

Articles

I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

Anticipatory Edits, Patrick Barry

Articles

Good writing, I often tell my students, is “anticipating the edits of your boss.” I then clarify that the definition of “boss” in that statement is intentionally expansive. A supervisor at work can count. A teacher in school can count. So can a valued customer or client. he key is to start thinking about two things: 1) the actual people who are going to review your writing; and 2) the likely changes they’ll make to it. By implementing those changes yourself— before the document ever hits your boss’s desk or inbox—you can save them a lot of time and cognitive …

Investigative Advocacy: The Mechanics Of Muckraking, Patrick Barry

Articles

This essay argues that drafting a complaint is a form of investigative advocacy and that the best of them uphold the tradition of muckraking journalism.

Preface, Margaret C. Hannon, Ruth Anne Robbins

Other Publications

The overarching theme of Volume 19 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD is how legal communication shapes the law, and how doers of legal writing can use their resources to make it better. The volume begins with a fascinating article from Aaron Kirschenfeld and Alexa Chew, “Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, and the Universe of Thinkable Thoughts.” In their article, Professors Kirschenfeld and Chew shed light on whether the switch from print research to digital research has changed the way that law students and lawyers conduct research. To do so, the article uses the “citation stickiness” metric, which analyzes whether …

Charles Dickens' Novels In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article examines written judicial opinions that contain references to novels by Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the British novelist and social critic who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Age. Americans today still read Dickens’ best-known novels, and the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal and state courts have cited and quoted from them.

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

Articles

In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …