Law Commons^™

Toward A Writing-Centered Legal Education, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

The future of legal education should bridge the divide between learning and practicing the law. This requires three things. First, tuition should bear some reasonable relationship to graduates’ employment outcomes. Perhaps Harvard is justified in charging $50,000 in tuition, but a fourth-tier law school is not. Second, no school should resist infusing more practical skills training into the curriculum. This does not mean that law schools should focus on adding clinics and externships to the curriculum. The focus should be on developing critical thinkers and persuasive writers that can solve real-world legal problems. Third, law schools should be transparent about …

Experiential Legal Writing: The New Approach To Practicing Like A Lawyer, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Law students engage in various types of “experiential” learning activities while in school, such as clinics and externships, but they graduate without the experience necessary to practice law. This is traceable to a glaring deficiency at most law schools: a writing program that is comprehensive, properly sequenced, and integrated across and throughout the law school curriculum.

First, most graduates have never drafted the documents they will encounter in law practice. Additionally, they have not drafted and re-drafted such documents while also participating in real-world simulations as they would in actual practice. Instead, students graduate having drafted an appellate brief, a …

No Shoehorn Required: How A Required, Three- Year, Persuasion-Based Legal Writing Program Easily Fits Within The Broader Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

In this article, we incorporate our proposal into the broader curricular context, and argue for more separation, not more integration, among the analytical, practical, and experiential pillars of legal education. All three are indispensable—and independent—pillars of real-world legal education:[1] (1) the analytical focuses on critical thinking; (2) legal writing combines—and refines—thinking through practical skills training; and (3) experiential learning involves students in the practice of law. To help law students master all three, the curriculum should be designed in a largely sequential (although sometimes concurrent) order, to embrace, not blur, their substantive differences, and to approach inter-foundational collaboration with …

Hitting The Wall As A Legal Writer, Elizabeth Fajans

Elizabeth Fajans

This article tries to answer a question students frequently ask, but which I often find hard to answer, namely, how they can move from a “B+” or “A-” on a paper to an “A.” Papers at the “B” level or lower have clearly identifiable faults: they lack thoroughness, misstate authority, draw imperfect analogies, make implausible arguments, or contain organizational, grammatical, or citation errors. In contrast, a “B+” or “A-“ paper may make none of these errors; they just lack a certain something, some value-added factor not captured by standard rubrics. Not only are the value-added factors harder to identify and …

Come A Little Closer So That I Can See You My Pretty: The Use And Limits Of Fiction Point Of View Techniques In Appellate Briefs, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Come a Little Closer so That I Can See You my Pretty, The Use and Limits of Fiction Point of Techniques in Appellate Briefs began when I was struggling to explain point of view to my students in Appellate Advocacy. They represented a fictional criminal defendant whose bag was searched when the police were executing a premises warrant at his friend’s house. My students scrunched up their faces when I tried to explain why they should not start their facts with the friend’s crime that spurred the search. The crime happened first in time, so to them it came first. …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way To Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent and will, therefore, not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …