Toward a Writing-Centered Legal Education

The future of legal education—and experiential learning—should be grounded in a curriculum that requires students to take writing courses throughout law school. Additionally, the curriculum should be one that collapses the distinction between doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical faculty, as well as merges analytical, practical, and clinical instruction into a real world curriculum. The justification for a writing-intensive program of legal education is driven by the reality that persuasive writing ability is among the most important skills a lawyer must possess and a skill that many lawyers and judges claim graduates lack. Part of the problem is that law schools dedicate fewer than six credits to required legal writing courses and treat legal writing faculty as if they were second-class citizens. That should stop now. In making legal education more writing-centered, law schools can help struggling students to become competent writers, cultivate an educational environment in which good writers can become great writers, and bridge the divide between legal education and law practice

A Writing Revolution: Using Legal Writing\u27s \u27Hobble\u27 to Solve Legal Education\u27s Problem

The attached article responds to a 2011 article by John Lynch, published in the Journal of Legal Education, that urged legal writing faculty to return to an outmoded and ineffective writing pedagogy, the “product approach,” on the grounds that it would make teaching legal writing easier. This article builds on the work of Carol McCrehan Parker and others interested in writing across the curriculum and argues that the only way to reduce legal writing’s “hobble” and to solve legal education’s problem is to create a six-semester writing requirement. The reason law students are graduating without adequate preparation for practice is that law schools have failed to commit to teaching writing. Most law students graduate having been required to take only an introductory course that teaches practice-related writing skills and an upper-class seminar with a scholarly writing requirement. Law schools can no longer afford to rely on a small percentage of faculty or externships to teach the most important skill law students have to offer on graduation. Because matriculating students have less writing skill and experience than they did even a decade ago, the need for a six-semester writing requirement is that much greater. This article then discusses a proposed writing curriculum that would not unduly burden law schools or their faculty and concludes with additional, specific recommendations for incorporating writing across the curriculum—in doctrinal and writing courses—to improve students’ metacognitive skills and their ability to transfer those skills to practice

A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory and Practice in the Legal Writing Classroom

The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social context in which lawyers write. The legal writing professor\u27s task is to impart to her students the intellectual ballast necessary to navigate complex analytical challenges in the workplace. By combining rhetorical theory and practice in the legal writing classroom, the professor can pique students\u27 interest, hasten their learning, and help them develop transferable skills better than teaching by imitation alone. In addition, teaching the rhetorical nature of law in a legal writing course helps students debunk sooner the myth of black letter law in their doctrinal courses. Finally, as the Carnegie Report indicates, a more holistic approach to teaching can best blend the analytical and practical habits of mind that professional practice demands.... This Article begins with a brief history of the separation of theory and practice in the law classroom and the impact that it has had on the quality and reputation of writing as its own subject. The Article argues that despite a wave of pedagogical advances, legal writing as its own subject has ample room to grow. For legal writing courses to achieve intellectual maturity, they must incorporate rhetorical theory. To ignore it is to confirm Plato\u27s suspicion that rhetoric is a discipline without a subject matter and to enable the insidious undervaluing of our profession. As detailed below, there are several advantages to teaching legal writing as rhetoric. Although not the focus of this Article, a corollary advantage may be to help legal writing faculty achieve academic equality, which benefits teacher and student alike. For a variety of reasons, this Article concludes that legal writing professors are responsible for teaching both practical skills as well as the theories that inform them

A Holistic View of Legal Documentation from Shari'ah Perspective

The legal documentation having several features tends to make legal writing formal. This formality can take the form of long sentences, complex constructions, archaic and hyper-formal vocabulary, and a focus on content to the exclusion of reader needs. Some of this formality in legal writing is necessary and desirable, given the importance of some legal documents and the seriousness of the circumstances in which some legal documents are used. Yet not all formality in legal writing is justified in the Shariah point of view. It may sometimes to the extent that formality hinders reader comprehension, and do not reflect clear communication. This paper will explore some clauses of the legal documentation and analyze it check and balance from the Shariah perspective. In the second part of this paper, we will investigate some of controversial clauses that are deemed as prohibition elements. This paper conclude by proposing some suggestion in Islamizing the currently practice legal documentation in order to incorporate with the Shariah requirement.Legal documentation, rights and liabilities, Shariah requirement, prohibitions in legal documentation.

The Rhetoric of Email in Law Practice

This article responds to and appears alongside an article by Professor Kirsten Davis in the December 2013 issue of the Oregon Law Review. An interesting debate has arisen among legal writing faculty with respect to the primary form of communication today between attorneys, and between attorneys and clients. Although most legal writing faculty agree that teaching traditional memoranda continues to have pedagogical benefits for first-year students, there is disagreement on how to conceptualize and teach the use of email memoranda in law practice. Professor Davis argues that to think of and label “email memoranda” as something different from traditional memoranda is misguided. In contrast, this article argues that email memos are indeed different—that the medium of email has altered the nature of the message (as Marshall McLuhan might say). In other words, the process of writing email in the context of a conversation changes both the format and the nature of legal analysis. This author also believes that the question for legal writing faculty is not whether to teach traditional memoranda or email analysis but how to teach both well to prepare law students for the real world of law practice

Shadow writing and participant observation : a study of criminal justice social work around sentencing

The study of decision-making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio-legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision-makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision-making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre-sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called `shadow writing', involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these `shadow reports' with the real reports in a training-like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally

The Lawyer as Legal Scholar

I review Eugene Volokh's recent book, Academic Legal Writing. The book is nominally directed to law students and those who teach them (and for those audiences, it is outstanding), but it also contains a number of valuable lessons for published scholars. The book is more than a writing manual, however. I argue that Professor Volokh suggests implicitly that scholarship is underappreciated as a dimension of the legal profession. A well-trained lawyer, in other words, should have experience as a scholar. The argument sheds new light on ongoing discussions about the character of law schools

PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM TERHADAP INDIKASI GEOGRAFIS SEBAGAI CIRI SUATU PRODUK DI TINJAU DARI UNDANG-UNDANG NOMOR 15 TAHUN 2001 TENTANG MEREK

The purpose of this legal writing are know the legal protection of geographical Indications as product characteristic in Indonesia that is observed from constitution number 15th, 2001 about trademark, so we will know the important of geographical indication registration for legal protection toward geographical indication, superabundance and destitute is registered or not the geographical indication , and we will also know the factors cause, why the government not release government regulation about the way of geographical indication registration yet. Beside that to know execution measure of the constitutions about trademark article 56 paragraph (9), constitution number 15th, 2001, about the way of geographical indication registration, so the legal protection of geographical indication product in Indonesia can be done.\ud The methods that used by writer for this legal writing is yuridis normative method with statute approach. The law material that used by writer for this legal writing are constitution number 15th, 2001 about trademark, and also the previous constitution about trademark are constitution number 14th, 1997 and constitution number 19th, 1992. Beside that, writer also using writing that flatten theories and specialist opinions, and also the research result report that take in.\ud From that problem, about the legal protection of geographical indication as product characteristic that is observed from constitution number 15th, 2001 about trademark, after analyzed by interpret all of the legal material, the result is; the rule about geographical indication in constitution number 15th, 2001 about trademark is cant be used as principle within to offer the legal protection of geographical indication product in Indonesia. It cause in that constitution about trademark article 56 paragraph (9) is mention that the rule about the way of geographical indication registration are regulated continuation by the government regulation, meanwhile, that government regulation is affect finished yet until now.\ud Without the government regulation about the way of geographical indication registration, a lot of geographical indication products in Indonesia is can be registered yet. However, that registration is very important for the legal protection of the geographical indication product. With this registration, the geographical indication product could be accept the legal protection according to clear and decided. Without this registration, it will cause the geographical indication product is could not be accept the legal protection, so it is not close the probably, the geographical indication product is take advantaged by persons who haven’t right

Preface: Academic Freedom and Legal Education

Preface to a collection of papers delivered at a conference on Academic Freedom and Legal Education, held at the Tulane University School of Law on April 3 and 4,1992. Speaking or writing about academic freedom propels one from current controversies toward implicit or explicit propositions about the nature and goals of legal education

Plotting a New Course

After months of review by faculty and administrators, the School begins the millennium with a newly approved curriculum that includes intensive instruction in legal analysis and writing