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Defining Legal Writing: An Empirical Analysis Of The Legal Memorandum, Frederick M. Hart, Hunter M. Breland
Defining Legal Writing: An Empirical Analysis Of The Legal Memorandum, Frederick M. Hart, Hunter M. Breland
Faculty Scholarship
This report examines legal writing as it is represented in legal memoranda prepared by first-semester law students in twelve different law schools. It is based on the cumulative judgments of the instructors and professors of law in those institutions, humanities specialists at Educational Testing Service, and two legal consultants. A taxonomy of the elements of the legal memorandum was developed from annotations and written and tape-recorded commentaries on 237 legal memoranda written by the law students. Ratings of the overall quality and of the importance of specific elements of the legal memoranda were conducted on multiple occasions by different judges. …