Nova Southeastern Univ., Shepard Broad Law Center

Lawyering Skills and Values (LSV)
Lawyering Skills and Values (LSV) introduces an innovative approach to legal education, one that integrates legal theory with practice, professionalism, and technology right from the first day of law school. The cornerstone of the program is the development of legal research and writing skills in a practical context, with an emphasis on professionalism, client-centered representation, and ethical lawyering. In each three-credit semester, students participate in alternative dispute resolution, apply the latest law office technology, and resolve practical and ethical issues that lawyers commonly encounter in the practice of law. The first-year focuses on predictive legal analysis in a transactional context, using state law and secondary research materials. Students assist clients in transactional matters and write objective memoranda of law before counseling their clients. By researching, negotiating, and drafting a contract, students themselves develop the facts that a court would use in a future interpretation of the contract. In the second semester, the Program focuses on persuasive writing in a pre-trial litigation context, using federal and state law and secondary research materials. In pre-trial matters, students take primary responsibility for investigating the facts of a client’s case in preparation for trial. They draft a demand letter, client counseling letter, and a persuasive memorandum in support of or opposition to a pre-trial motion. At the end of the semester, students argue their motions orally and participate in a mediation of a dispute. Throughout the year, students interview and counsel clients, resolve practical and ethical dilemmas, and draft correspondence to clients and opposing attorneys.

With this background in transactional and litigation skills, students entering second-year elect to follow either a business track or a litigation track. All second year students have the opportunity to research, write, and orally argue legal issues within their area of concentration. Students in the business track will select courses designated as Advanced Lawyering Skills and Values Transactional courses. These courses will provide instruction in a variety of transactional skills, including: (1) determining what facts need to be solicited from the client and how best to solicit and evaluate such facts, (2) analyzing and applying the applicable law to various facts, (3) determining appropriate options for a client and analyzing the potential advantages and disadvantages of such choices, (4) communicating such choices to the client and counseling the client with respect to the choices, (5) identifying ethical considerations regarding such representation, such as determining the identity of the client being represented and disclosing potential conflicts, and (6) implementing choices through selection or drafting of documents. Negotiation skills also may be taught when relevant. Students electing the litigation track will take Civil Pre-Trial Practice and other courses designated as Advanced Lawyering Skills and Values Litigation courses. These courses will provide instruction in a variety of litigation skills, including: (1) interviewing clients and witnesses to determine the relevant facts and the veracity of certain persons, (2) preparing and answering interrogatories, taking depositions, and developing other pre-trial litigation skills, (3) determining appropriate general litigation strategies as well as specific strategies for a particular case, (4) communicating with and counseling clients, (5) identifying ethical issues applicable to various aspects of litigation, and (6) developing negotiation skills.

Faculty
The Law Center has recently taken dramatic steps to remove all distinctions between the faculty in and out of the Program. All LSV professors have pay parity with equivalent members of the doctrinal faculty. Although LSV professors cannot receive tenure, they do have all of the rights and privileges: full voting rights (including on all promotion and tenure decisions); ability to receive summer stipends; renewable five year contracts after the first five years; same title as all other members of the faculty; and the same research assistant and travel budgets. The student-faculty ratio for LSV is one of the lowest in the nation with full-time professors—approximately 26 to 1. In addition, each professor in the LSV program rotates out of the department every five years to spend time working on scholarship. For more information on the program, contact the LSV Director, Anthony Niedwiecki at niedwieckia@nsu.law.nova.edu or any other faculty member in the program. You can find out more about the LSV Program and its faculty by going to: http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/lsv/

University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law

The goal of the writing program at Pacific McGeorge School of Law is to produce thoughtful, skillful, and ethical advocates, attorneys who enter the complex, dynamic world of contemporary legal practice with the theoretical foundations and rhetorical tools necessary to make a positive impact.

Our formal writing program is organized as a two-year required program. First-year students take Legal Process, a 3-unit, two-semester course that focuses on the foundations of legal advocacy - legal research and writing. The curriculum covers the American legal system, legal analysis, basic legal research, predictive writing, and a short introduction to persuasive writing. In the first semester, in addition to short writing assignments ranging from single paragraphs to drafts of a predictive memo, the students write and re-write two closed-universe predictive memos. They also study research strategies and sources, both paper and electronic, and take a research examination at the end of the first semester. In the second semester, the students research and write a longer predictive memo and then research and write both a first draft and a final draft of a persuasive memo to a trial court. Both semesters include mandatory faculty-student conferences.

In the second year, the students take a 3-unit Appellate and International Advocacy course that covers a semester and a half. The course entails writing a complex persuasive document to a U.S. appellate court that involves both domestic issues and an international issue. Students in the course use Michael R. Fontham, Michael Vitiello, and David Miller’s Persuasive Written and Oral Advocacy in Trial and Appellate Courts, a text developed in the course and published by Aspen. The course is structured using large-group lectures and small-group workshops. Full-time faculty provide the lectures, while the workshops are run by a practicing attorney and an upper-level student. Students practice oral argument throughout the course and engage in a final moot court competition in the spring semester.

McGeorge has recently introduced an upper-level advanced writing course and an advanced advocacy seminar and plans to add a transactional drafting course and other elective writing courses in the future.

The first-year Legal Process program is staffed by a Director, five full-time Instructors, and seven adjuncts. Six of the adjuncts, who are all practicing attorneys from the Sacramento and San Francisco areas, staff the Evening Division program, while the seventh adjunct teaches a section in the Day Division. The five full-time Instructors teach two sections of approximately 20 students each. The Director and full-time Instructors are on renewable three-year contracts, while the adjuncts are all on one-year renewable contracts. Several of the full-time faculty teach elective courses, including Community Property, Advanced Legal Writing, Advanced Appellate Advocacy Seminar, and Applied Remedies. We are also considered for courses in summer school, although we are not required to teach in the summer. We serve on faculty committees and attend and vote at all faculty meetings, except on matters involving hiring, promotion, and tenure. We share in the same benefits package given to tenured and tenure-track faculty, and the full-time Legal Process faculty all received mid-year salary increases during the 2005-2006 academic year to bring us more in parity with other schools. All Legal Process faculty are appointed by the Dean. The Appellate and International Advocacy course is taught by a tenured faculty member and two faculty members on long-term contracts.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LAW SCHOOL

The University of Minnesota Law School requires students to complete a three-year writing requirement to graduate. In the fall of the first year, students concentrate on common law legal analysis through a series of building-block, predictive writing exercises, followed by two drafts of a closed-research office memorandum relating to an issue presented by a contract scenario, followed by two drafts of a full open-research office memorandum (relating to an expanded version of the contract scenario). Students submit some kind of writing exercise virtually every week of the semester, receive individual feedback from instructors, engage in peer review, and give mock client advice.

In the spring of the first year, students concentrate on statutory interpretation and build upon their common law analytical skills through a series of building-block, persuasive writing exercises that lead up to an original and a rewrite of a full set of district court motion papers and two oral arguments of the motion. Students submit some kind of writing exercise during most weeks of the semester, receive individual feedback from instructors, engage in peer review, and engage in persuasive argument.

In the second year, we require a full-year appellate advocacy experience involving multiple brief drafts and oral argument exercises, except for any students who are participating as staff members on one of the scholarly law journals (for whom there are elective appellate advocacy offerings). Law Review staffers write pieces under individual faculty supervisors who certify the nature and quality of the work.

In the third year, students may satisfy the writing requirement through designated, faculty-supervised moot court, law journal and senior seminar experiences.

The first year legal writing program and basic second year appellate advocacy program are taught in small sections of roughly twelve students each. Attorney instructors, paired with upper-level student partners, teach within a central program design prepared and run by a director with full clinical tenure (i.e. continuous appointment terminable only for good cause or financial exigency). Various attorney instructors currently have respectively fifteen, ten, eight, and five years of experience teaching at the law school within the program.

Over the last seventeen years, students from the programs have won three national and eleven regional moot court championships, five national and eighteen regional best brief awards, twelve regional best oral advocate awards, two national best speaker awards, two Burton legal writing prizes and the Brown Award for Excellence in Legal Writing.

Contact person:
Bradley G. Clary
Clinical Professor of Law and
Director of Applied Legal Instruction
clary002@umn.edu

Rutgers – Camden School of Law

Legal Writing Professors at Rutgers-Camden have almost complete autonomy over all but the basic focus of the first-year course, i.e., memos in the fall and briefs/moot court in the spring. Otherwise, professors are free to design every other aspect of their courses around their pedagogical aims and scholarly focus. Classes have a student-teacher ratio of approximately 36 to 1. We also have teaching assistants earning grades for their work. The upper-level curriculum is designed to enhance the depth of student knowledge and also to introduce students to more sophisticated techniques of persuasion, drawing on classical rhetoric, psychology theory, creative writing, and visual design theory.

The LRW program is integrated with the school’s other lawyering programs, including the school’s clinics, competitive moot court, and pro bono programs. This interdependence is reflected in collaboration among faculty. Many of us teach extensively in or work with the clinical and pro bono programs. Likewise, several writing professors have created memo and brief problems stemming from scenarios arising within Rutgers’ Domestic Violence Clinic, and first-year students have researched and written as if they were working for clients within that clinic.

Rutgers – Camden supports the scholarly development of the legal writing faculty. Legal writing faculty have ABA Standard 405 (c) status. We are eligible for sabbaticals, and we are encouraged to present at conferences. We have published scholarship in the field of legal writing and in other doctrinal areas.

Additionally, Rutgers – Camden hosts, maintains, and develops innovations for the LWI Idea Bank. For more information about the Rutgers – Camden Legal Research and Writing program, please contact:

Prof. Jason Cohen at jayco@camden.rutgers.edu;
Prof. Sarah Ricks at sricks@camden.rutgers.edu;
Prof. Ruth Anne Robbins at ruthanne@camden.rutgers.edu;
Prof. Sheila Rodriguez at sheilaro@camden.rutgers.edu; or
Prof. Carol Wallinger at cwallinger@camden.rutgers.edu

Mercer University School of Law

Program: Mercer has a 3-semester required program totaling the equivalent of 9 credits. In the first semester, students take Introduction to Legal Research and Legal Analysis. They also complete a required writing component as part of either Contracts or Criminal Law. The second semester covers predictive research and writing, including the forms of legal reasoning and common organizational paradigms. The third semester focuses on rhetorical techniques of persuasion and covers research, trial & appellate briefs, and 2 oral arguments. All core courses include drafts and re-writes of 2-3 major assignments per semester as well as a number of smaller assignments. Faculty hold both required and optional student conferences. The upper division includes 9 research and writing electives, and many students take a research or writing course every semester of their law study. Mercer also offers a Certificate Program in Advanced Legal Writing, Research, and Drafting, which takes upper-division students through an advanced research and writing curriculum. The Program includes weekly meetings of Advanced Writing Groups. Each Writing Group is limited to 6 students and is modeled after Peter Elbow’s concept of a "community of writers." Certificate Program students complete 17 credit hours of research and writing courses, not counting law review or moot court.

Faculty: All legal writing professors are either tenured or on a tenure track. The tenure-track is the same track as that of any other professor and includes identical salary, benefits, offices, administrative support, professional development funds, research stipends and assistants, voting rights, and committee responsibilities. There is no director. The faculty meets weekly, shares ideas, and makes programmatic decisions together. Everyone teaches a non-legal writing course as part of their normal course load (not as an overload). Legal Writing faculty have written or have contracts for 3 legal writing text books, 2 books in other areas, over 20 law review articles, and over 25 other publications. They regularly make presentations at legal writing conferences and have served in leadership positions in LWI, ALWD, the ABA Communication Skills Committee, and the AALS Section. Mercer serves as the host school for the Legal Writing Institute and co-hosted the 2006 Conference in Atlanta.

Website: www.law.mercer.edu/academics/legal_writing/index.cfm

Contact person: Edwards_LH@mercer.edu

George Mason University School of Law

George Mason University School of Law offers an intensive three-year legal writing program to prepare its students for the practical demands in the practice of law. In the first year, students are introduced to both enacted law and common law, learn a variety of research methodologies using both print and electronic database resources, learn the art of analyzing legal concepts, and the practical skills of presenting this research and analysis in a coherent, organized, and logical written product. Students begin writing objective legal memoranda in the first semester, and then progress to the art of persuasive writing through a trial level problem, where students are required to write both pre-trial pleadings and trial memoranda. At the end of the second semester, students engage in oral argument before local practitioners and judges. In the third semester, students continue developing and refining their research, analytical, and writing skills by working though an appellate problem at the federal appellate level. Students research and prepare two complete appellate briefs according to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure – one for the Appellant and one for the Appellee – and then engage in oral argument before legal practitioners. In the fourth semester, students are divided into law firms and counsel the same client through a variety of simulated circumstances requiring different types of legal drafting, from simple contracts governing the behavior of the client and others, to drafting legislation and preparing a will. Students also engage in a settlement negotiation with their colleagues and finalize the terms of the settlement reached into a settlement agreement for their client.

The LRWA Program at George Mason also requires at least two additional writing courses beyond the first two years. For those students in the general law track, the additional writing requirement can be satisfied by taking either two 400- or 600-level seminar courses or one 400-/600-level seminar and one “Writing” course (designated by a (W) following the title of the course). Students in the specialty track programs use their theses and other required courses to fulfill the upper-level writing requirements.

For additional information, please contact Elizabeth A. Keith, Director of Legal, Research, Writing and Analysis, George Mason University School of Law, 3301 N. Fairfax Drive, MS 1G3, Arlington, VA 22201, (703) 993-9158 (telephone), (703) 993-8202 (facsimile), ekeith@gmu.edu.

Texas Tech University School of Law

Texas Tech University School of Law offers a two-semester, six-credit Legal Practice course that covers a range of lawyering skills: analysis, research, writing, ADR, oral advocacy, and client interviewing/counseling. The course is taught in a contextualized and integrated manner. The LP Professors teach all facets of the course (with support from the library staff for specialized research workshops), and most exercises and skills are taught within the arc of a typical client representation (interview to research to memo, or trial brief to negotiation/mediation to appellate brief). The LP Professors are supported by Teaching Fellows--2L and 3L students who assist with giving workshops, grading objective assignments, running exercises before distribution, etc. This year's student-teacher ratio is 39:1.

In the fall semester, students write a closed memo and open memo (each with drafts), complete three extensive research exercises, draft a client letter and counsel a client, and take a writing exam.

In the spring semester, the students start with an in-depth 5-week course-within-a-course on ADR with related writing exercises. They also draft a brief and give an oral argument. They have an MPT-type final as a capstone assignment.

The professors who teach LP enjoy 405(c) status and are treated like other faculty in terms of research funds, travel, offices, committee assignments, etc. They vote on all matters except tenure-track hiring and promotion. In addition, the school is very receptive to offering LP faculty room for professional growth/change (one LP faculty member joined the doctrinal faculty, and another was named deputy director of a new specialty law center). The Legal Practice Program also includes a part-time Writing Specialist who is available for workshops, conferences with students, etc.

University of Dayton School of Law

The Legal Profession Program, developed in 1988, is a comprehensive two-semester, six credit-hour course sequence devoted to building legal research, analysis and writing skills in the context of the evolving technology used in law practice. The Program’s classes meet in small groups with experienced full-time faculty and stress practical applications of essential lawyering skills. Faculty meet frequently with students for individualized writing and research conferences. Assignments are submitted via an innovative e-filing system developed at the University of Dayton School of Law.

Throughout the Legal Profession course sequence, students are trained in such important skills as accessing and understanding legal authority and effectively communicating legal analysis within the context of the following specific practice areas: advocacy, general/transactional practice; and intellectual property. As a result, our students quickly develop the strong professional skills necessary to be productive and efficient. After the first year, students continue their skills development with upper level writing courses, required externships, intra-sessions, and capstone courses.

The professors in the Program are on long-term contracts of one, three, and five years under a policy designed to satisfy 405(c) requirements. Program faculty have published numerous books and articles, frequently present at LWI and ALWD national and regional conferences, and serve on these organizations’ committees. The Program’s former director, Becky Cochran, served on the ALWD Board of Directors.

For further information, please contact: (Maria.Crist@notes.udayton.edu)

The Legal Profession Program is further described at: http://law.udayton.edu/. Click on “Faculty Profiles” describing the individual accomplishments of faculty associated with the Program: Rebecca Cochran, Maria Perez Crist, Sheila Miller, Kristen Safier, Lori Shaw, Susan Wawrose, and Julie Zink.

The Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York City

The Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing Program at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law provides in-depth instruction in lawyering skills, legal writing and research for successful academic performance and legal practice. A closely supervised first year course is matched with advanced writing courses for both J.D. and LL.M. students and the Legal Writing Center supports individual students’ development throughout law school.

First-Year Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing is a two-semester course. Each year, the first year course is taught in over thirty small sections, each of eight to sixteen students. Legal Writing I focuses on basic principles of writing, language structure and usage, organization; case reading; legal analysis and case synthesis; ethics in informational legal writing; manual legal research methods and skills; and includes exercises in fact gathering and interviewing skills. Legal Writing II introduces students to computer-assisted research sources and usage, focuses on advocacy writing skills and ethics, includes exercises in negotiation, litigation drafting and strategy, includes a class visit to an appellate court, and concludes with an exercise in appellate brief writing and oral argument. Work in both semesters includes in-class instruction, in-library instruction, and individual faculty-student conferences and provides extensive written and oral feedback on all assignments. Classes are taught in small sections by experienced practitioners. Advanced Writing Courses for LL.M. students feature a curriculum designed to specifically meet the needs of returning and international students.

The Legal Writing Center brings together writing, research and other academic services for students and serves as a referral opportunity for faculty and administration. All student support is provided by experienced members of the writing faculty. The Legal Writing Center offers the following services: individual work with students on writing, analytic, outlining, note-taking and exam-taking needs; individual work with LL.M. students on English language, writing, analytic, outlining, note-taking and exam-taking needs; workshops on Research Methodology, Citation, Exam Preparation, Spanish for Lawyers and other topics; training for Teaching and Research Assistants; a manual and materials for Legal Writing Teaching Assistants; advisors for students who are writing Journal Notes, fulfilling the writing requirement of the Summer Institute Program or submitting articles to Writing Competitions; Judicial Appellate Advocacy Talks; as a clearinghouse for doctrinal tutoring; and a Legal Writing Resource Guide (distributed to all students).

Faculty members are experienced practitioners whose workplaces include major New York City law firms, the U.S. Attorneys Office, the New York State Attorney General’s Office and other private and public firms and organizations. Many Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing faculty members have held federal clerkships and have written and/or edited books and articles in diverse subjects in the legal field.

For further information about the Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing Program at Cardozo School of Law, please contact Leslie Newman, Professor of Law and Director of Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing Program, at 212.790.0323, or newman@yu.edu

University of Baltimore

The Legal Skills Program at the University of Baltimore is in the midst of an exciting transition. Since 2001, the required curriculum has spanned three semesters, for a total of seven fully‑graded credits of research and writing instruction. The curriculum treated writing as a discrete subject, however, and relied primarily on adjunct faculty and student teaching assistants to teach the writing courses. Starting with the 2006-2007 academic year, we have begun the process of integrating instruction in writing and doctrine.

Our innovative Introduction to Lawyering Skills (ILS)/Torts class joins two previously separate courses — a four­‑credit torts course and a three-credit research and writing course — into a seven‑credit intensive course integrating instruction in both subjects. This new curriculum allows students to learn doctrine through writing and learn writing in a doctrinal context. The course is taught in small sections of approximately 30 students by full-time, tenured and tenure‑track faculty recruited from among the ranks of experienced writing professionals. One quarter of this year’s entering class is enrolled in the new course. The transition will continue over the next three to four years until all of the 1L students take this integrated course.

The intensive instruction in ILS/Torts provides momentum for the second and third semester courses, Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing (LARW) II and III. LARW II is a two-credit simulation course that introduces students to the basic documents they are likely to encounter in pursuing or defending a civil lawsuit, including pleadings, settlement agreements, client letters, and motions. LARW III is a two‑credit Moot Court course in which students write an appellate brief and argue before a panel of judges. This sequence allows students to acquire, build, and reinforce their research and writing skills.

Although students benefit from the instruction provided by tenured and tenure‑track faculty in their first semester, UB Law School recognizes the significant contributions practicing lawyers and student teachers can bring to the educational process. Accordingly, the LARW II and III courses continue to be taught by adjunct faculty and teaching assistants under the supervision of the tenured program co‑directors. The adjunct writing professors come from varied backgrounds and include judges, partners and associates in law firms, government attorneys, sole practitioners, and state legislators. The writing professors teach small sections of 10‑14 students, providing instruction that is relevant to the day-to-day practice of law and keeping the curriculum focused on the skills necessary for successful legal practice. The teaching assistants act as both mentors and teachers to their students.

Many students say that the Legal Skills Program's courses are the most difficult courses they take in law school. Although the curriculum is challenging, students receive in-depth, personal feedback on their work in each course. The reward for their hard work is being prepared for legal practice.

Contact: Professor Eric B. Easton (eeaston@ubalt.edu)Professor Amy E. Sloan (asloan@ubalt.edu)

Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis

Full-time faculty:
Joan Ruhtenberg
Cynthia Adams
Ken Chestek
Jim Dimitri
Allison Martin
Debby McGregor
Joel Schumm

We at IU-Indy are proud of the advancements we have made in our program and the contributions we have made to the legal writing field. We are especially pleased to be hosting the next LWI Biennial Conference on July 14-17, 2008.

The Course:
IU-Indy has a required three-semester, six-credit graded writing course. The first two semesters of the J.D. course cover objective writing, persuasive writing (at the trial court level), and an introduction to oral advocacy. The professors enjoy a great deal of autonomy, choosing their own texts and devising their own syllabi with shared goals. Volunteer upper level students are assigned to work with each writing professor’s students on a 1:10 basis.

The third semester is presently integrated with the Intramural Moot Court Competition and covers appellate advocacy as well as the drafting of non-litigation documents. The third semester is taught primarily by experienced adjuncts. Librarians with J.D. degrees teach research throughout the three semesters of the program. Faculty/student ratios typically average between 1:35-40 for full-time professors.

The Faculty:
The program has seven full-time faculty members, either with 405(c) status or on track for 405(c) protection (which they may apply for after successfully completing three years of teaching). Salaries are competitive, and additional funds (up to $14,000) are available for summer research grants. Writing professors often teach summer or academic courses other than legal writing, including Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure, Juvenile Justice, Civil Procedure, Torts for LL.M. Students, Trusts and Estates, etc. Several writing professors serve as advisors to the national Moot Court teams, and all writing faculty members participate on law school committees.

Faculty members receive a research leave prior to clinical tenure and an annual professional development fund. All writing professors vote on all matters (other than some appointment and promotion issues). The seven full-time writing professors collectively have over eighty years teaching experience in the field.

IU-Indy serves as the host school for the LWI discussion listserv, LRWPROF-L, as well as various other lists that serve the LWI community. Ken serves as Treasurer of the LWI Board, Ken and Joel serve as Board members for the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, and Allison and Jim serve as Assistant Editors of the Journal. Debby is a member of the LWI Bar Outreach Committee.

Joan is co-author of A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method, and Debby and Cynthia will be publishing The International Lawyer’s Guide to Legal Analysis and Communication with Aspen in 2008. All faculty members continue to publish in legal writing and other doctrinal areas.For further information, please contact Joan Ruhtenberg, Director, jruhten@iupui.edu, or Debby McGregor, Assistant Director, dmcgreg@iupui.edu. You may also visit our webpage at http://www.indylaw.indiana.edu/courses/legalwriting.htm

WESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW

Western State University College of Law is a practice-oriented law school, with courses that emphasize the development of lawyering skills. Professional Skills I and II form the core for the professional skills curriculum and are required for all students. Class sizes are limited to 15 students. Like all first-year courses at WSU, Professional Skills courses are graded and are worth three credits.

Over the past two years, the faculty has made substantial improvements to the Professional Skills Program. The Professional Skills Program is now organized and administered under a Director/Assistant Director Model, with adjunct instructors teaching individual classes. In 2005, the faculty appointed Professor Marc McAllister as the tenure-track Director of Professional Skills. Before coming to Western State, Professor McAllister served as a law clerk for a United States Circuit Court of Appeals judge and practiced as a litigator at a large law firm. WSU also recently hired a full-time, non-tenure track Assistant Director.

The Director has compiled a core group of adjunct instructors, all of whom have taught legal writing and research in the past. The Director and Assistant Director have implemented an extensive training program for adjuncts. Training workshops consist of techniques for implementing learning theories in the classroom, grading calibration exercises, instruction on implementing technology into the legal writing curriculum, and techniques for teaching a diverse student body (WSU’s student body is consistently ranked among the most diverse in the nation).

The Professional Skills Program teaches the foundational skills of legal research, case synthesis, legal and factual analysis, citation, and objective and persuasive legal writing. The courses comport with the “process-oriented” approach to writing instruction, teaching legal writing in stages reflecting the writing processes employed by experts. These courses also fully integrate research and writing instruction. The process-oriented approach enhances student learning by providing opportunity for instruction at each stage of the writing process, and by providing for immediate application of all research instruction.

All assignments in Professional Skills are original and are based on current legal issues. Professional Skills I includes four major writing assignments, which each increase in difficulty from the previous assignment. The first assignment uses only one precedent case. The second assignment increases in complexity by requiring application of several additional precedent cases. The final two assignments add the component of open research.

In Professional Skills II, students learn the art of advocacy, both oral and written. In this course, students write two major appellate briefs and engage in oral arguments. The brief assignments involve multiple drafts and increase in complexity from prior assignments. The semester culminates in a moot court competition in which all Professional Skills students argue before a panel of local judges, professors, and practicing attorneys.

Upper-level students are required to take six units of Advanced Professional Skills courses and must satisfy WSU’s Upper-Level Writing Requirement. The Advanced courses include those offering live-client experiences. Members of the local bench or highly-skilled trial lawyers teach these courses. Many students fulfill the Upper-Level Writing Requirement through WSU’s extensive judicial, criminal, and civil externship programs.

The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, Illinois

The John Marshall Law School has a multi-year Lawyering Skills Program. Each student is required to take four semesters of legal writing, equaling nine credit hours, and an additional semester of trial advocacy. The basic first-semester course is taught by full-time Lawyering Skills faculty in sections of twenty-five or fewer. This semester focuses on the structure of the legal system, sources of law, legal reasoning, predictive writing in memoranda and opinion letters, and extensive print and on-line research instruction. The second semester introduces persuasive writing, and includes a discussion of rhetoric, demand letters and briefs, and an introduction to oral advocacy. The second semester also includes advanced research training, including a review of print materials, and several sessions devoted to research on the internet and in multiple commercial databases. The third semester is devoted to advanced written and oral advocacy, including the intra-mural Herzog Moot Court Competition. The final semester is focused on drafting and transactional work, and includes advanced research training in specialized areas. Students satisfy the drafting requirement by taking one or more drafting courses. Options include a general drafting course, as well as specialized drafting courses in areas such as real estate, civil litigation, intellectual property, international business law, business planning, employee benefits law, and patent law drafting. There are doctrinal prerequisite courses for legal drafting. The fact that students come to the drafting courses with specialized knowledge enables the faculty to assign rigorous projects that reflect the challenges students will face as young lawyers.

In addition, John Marshall has a Writing Resource Center, staffed by a full-time Director and three writing specialists. The Center provides individual counseling and assistance to help students make the transition to legal writing. John Marshall also has an Appellate Advocacy Program that gives students many opportunities to represent the school in national and international moot court competitions.

Faculty: All full-time faculty members are tenured, tenure-track, or hold full-time clinical appointments. The full-time faculty members include Cynthia Bond, Maureen Collins, Joel Cornwell, Sonia Green, Ardath Hamann, Joanne Hodge, Maureen Straub Kordesh, Molly Lien, Samuel Olken, David Sorkin, Julie Spanbauer, and Mark Wojcik. All full-time faculty members have extensive experience teaching legal research and writing, and many have taught at John Marshall since the program was founded in 1984 by Susan Brody. In addition, the school attempts to enrich its program by having one or two distinguished visitors each year who are experienced teachers of legal writing.

The upper level advocacy and drafting courses are taught by adjunct faculty with demonstrated expertise in their respective areas of expertise. Enrollment in upper level courses is limited to fifteen students.

For further information about the Lawyering Skills Program, please contact Molly Lien, Professor of Law and Director of Lawyering Skills, at 312-987-2379, or 7lien@jmls.edu,
or Sonia Green, Associate Director and Assistant Professor of Law at 312- 427-2737, ext. 756, or 7green@jmls.edu.

For further information about the Appellate Advocacy programs, please contact Ardath Hamann, Associate Professor of Law and Director of Appellate Advocacy, 312-987-1410, or 7hamann@jmls.edu.

The John Marshall web site is at www.jmls.edu

Gonzaga University School of Law

Gonzaga has a required four-semester LR&W Program taught by seven experienced LR&W professors, who are eligible for long-term security, and have full voting rights and representation on faculty committees.

The first-year course, LR&W I & II, is a year-long, four-credit class. It focuses on developing and refining the following skills: legal analysis; legal research, both in print sources and on-line; and objective, predictive legal writing. Students work on a series of increasingly complex research and writing projects, i.e., legal memoranda and opinion letters. In the first semester, the first two projects are closed universe. The teachers fully critique these projects but do not assign a grade. Both projects emphasize legal analysis. Students then write at least one open research memo that is fully critiqued, but not graded in that semester. The final open research memo is fully graded. In the second semester, students focus on more complex resources such as constitutional provisions, statutes, legislative history, and administrative regulations. They write two open memos on complex issues and an opinion letter from one of their memos. Their final memo is graded. Students also take a graded research test at the end of each semester. In addition, throughout each semester, students are also writing shorter pieces and keeping research journals that are critiqued by the teachers. The goal is to teach the skill, critique the skill, and then grade the skill each semester. Individual conferences and rewrites are hallmarks of the first-year writing program.

The second-year classes (two credits) focus on transactional drafting and persuasive writing. The first-semester class, LR&W III, focuses on introducing students to transactional drafting with an ungraded contract drafting exercise. Students then move on to persuasive writing through a series of litigation documents. They start with a demand letter and then move on to a draft and a rewrite of a motion for summary judgment with supporting memorandum, exhibits, and affidavits. For the final semester, in LR&W IV, students work in pairs on an appellate brief. They then argue that brief either in a classroom setting or through our intra-school moot court competition that culminates in oral argument before members of the Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska Supreme Courts.

The LR&W faculty are ranked professors and have the opportunity to apply for five-year, presumptively renewable contracts in their fourth year of teaching LR&W. LR&W faculty have full voting rights and representation on all faculty committees. LR&W teachers often chair faculty committees. The teaching load varies depending on enrollment. LR&W teachers may teach outside the LR&W curriculum and are eligible for sabbaticals and full research stipends. Finally, the LR&W Program encourages academic freedom. Although the LR&W teachers coordinate the number and types of formal assignments, each teacher is free to develop syllabi and select textbooks.

University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law offers six credit hours in legal research and legal writing, covering two semesters, in the first year. The first semester covers the basics of legal analysis and predictive writing, with students mastering the process of legal writing through several drafts of office memoranda. The second semester provides a transition into persuasive writing, featuring trial-level and appellate briefs. Legal research is taught over two semesters by the law school’s library staff. The first-year writing program dovetails with the school’s second-year six-hour lawyering skills requirement, taught by practitioners and other full-time law faculty, which further develops students’ abilities in drafting, interviewing, counseling, and advocacy. In addition, UALR’s legal writing faculty offer upper-level writing electives in drafting, appellate advocacy, advanced legal research, and scholarly writing and editing, as well as teaching doctrinal courses such as Disability Law, Immigration Law, Family Law, and Decedents’ Estates.

UALR’s legal writing program has achieved significant gains in scope, credit hours, size, and status in the last several years. As the ABA recognizes, “schools that hire tenured or tenure-track professors specifically to teach legal writing recognize legal writing as an integral part of the law school curriculum and accept the writing professors as an integral part of the school’s faculty.” ABA Sourcebook on Legal Writing Programs 87 (Eric B. Easton et al., eds., 2d ed. 2006). Beginning in 2000, UALR has offered the tenure track to its legal writing faculty, reflecting the law school’s firm commitment to the program and its professors.

Current members of the legal writing faculty are Ranko Shiraki Oliver, Coleen Barger, Lindsey Gustafson, and Michael Flannery. The law school is hiring a new legal writing professor on the tenure track to begin in the 2007-08 school year. UALR recognizes, supports, and honors the accomplishments of its legal writing faculty. Professors Barger, Gustafson, and Oliver are each past winners of the law school’s annual Excellence in Teaching Award, with Professor Oliver winning the overall university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award. Professors Flannery and Barger are past winners of the law school’s Excellence in Research and Excellence in Service awards, respectively. Professors Gustafson and Barger helped to found and continue to work as faculty editors of the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process.

Contact person:Coleen Barger, cmbarger@ualr.edu
Web page address: www.ualr.edu/cmbarger

Southern Illinois University School of Law

First-year law students at Southern Illinois take two courses, Lawyering Skills I and II, in which they receive integrated instruction in legal research, legal analysis, and legal writing. The 1L's are also introduced to client interviewing, client counseling, negotiation, and oral argument. Almost all class meetings for these two courses include an active learning experience, often in small groups, and take full advantage of the latest classroom technology. Objective legal writing and basic research sources are covered in the fall; persuasive legal writing and more advanced research sources, including legislative history and regulatory research, are covered in the spring. Each course is three credits, graded with the same distribution requirements as all 1L courses.

The Lawyering Skills courses are staffed with experts in the various aspects of legal skills training. Primary responsibility for the writing aspects of the courses lies with the Associate Clinical Professors of Lawyering Skills (on a 405(c) promotion track with long-term contracts) and the Director of Lawyering Skills (tenured on the law faculty). Each student has at least four required conferences with their writing professor during the first year, receiving guidance as they work through multiple drafts of each major paper. Primary responsibility for the research aspects lies with the Professors of the Law Library (on the law library tenure track and tenured in the law library) and the Director of the Law Library (tenured on the law faculty). All these positions require scholarship for retention and promotion, and all may vote at faculty meetings. At times both a research and writing professor stand in front of the class, team teaching, and all the professors involved meet weekly to integrate their teaching efforts. The law school also has a Writing Across the Curriculum requirement, so that every course in the law school includes at least one writing assignment, with feedback provided, in addition to any final exam.

University of Oregon

The University of Oregon’s Legal Research and Writing Program—currently ranked 26th in the nation—has become even stronger in the past year. Last spring, the faculty created the position of senior instructor, which will provide LRW professors with longer contracts, a salary increase, and paid sabbaticals. Soon after, the faculty voted to award five-year contracts to senior instructors who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to teaching legal research and writing. In addition, class size has been reduced to 22 students, due to the hiring of additional LRW faculty. No LRW professor teaches more than two classes, keeping the student-faculty ratio around 43:1.

At Oregon, LRW is a required two-semester program that fully integrates research, analysis, writing, and advocacy skills. Topics covered by various professors include client interviewing, client letters, office roleplays, and trial arguments. The LRW faculty work collaboratively to ensure that students in various sections receive comparable experiences, though experimentation is encouraged. Each LRW professor is assisted by three student assistants who lead research training sessions (in print and online), hold office hours, assist with oral arguments, and mark exercises and citations. New LRW courses for upper level students have been added over the past few years.The full-time LRW faculty includes Suzanne Rowe, Joan Malmud, Kate Weatherly, and Rebekah Hanley. Part-time professors are Rosalind Lee and Megan McAlpin. Their prior work included federal clerkships, practice with major law firms, and public interest work. They have produced books and articles; they present at national and regional conferences and teach in international settings; and they have led CLE courses for major law firms. LRW faculty members are active nationally in LWI, ALWD, and AALS. For more information, visit our website at www.law.uoregon.edu/org/lrw.Suzanne E. RoweAssociate ProfessorUniversity of OregonEugene OR 97401srowe@law.uoregon.edu

Washburn

Washburn's Legal Analysis, Research and Writing program is taught exclusively by full-time, tenure-track professors led by a tenure-track director. The required program includes six graded credit hours during the first year. An upper-level writing requirement, first adopted in 1986, is currently under revision to reflect the ABA's evolving definition of "rigorous writing experience." The program also offers several upper-level research and writing electives as well as opportunities to collaborate with professors in writing amicus briefs to the Kansas appellate courts.

As part of Washburn's First Week program, incoming law students' baseline writing skills are measured using a standardized, norm-referenced assessment. The first-semester legal writing course introduces fundamental legal thought and the art of lawyering,including legal process, legal reasoning, case analysis and synthesis, legal research, and objective legal writing. Students receive extensive written feedback on a closed-universe office memo and an open- universe office memo. Professors provide extensive written feedback on at least one draft, and they conduct mandatory individual conferences with each student to discuss the graded draft. After students revise and resubmit the drafts, professors provide comprehensive written feedback on the final memos.

The second semester primarily focuses on statutory construction, legislative research, and legal advocacy through persuasive legal writing. Students receive comprehensive written and oral feedback on a client letter or demand letter, a pretrial motion, and an appellatebrief. Students are required to revise and resubmit the appellate brief in final form. At the end of the semester, all students participate in an ungraded moot court argument. Washburn's award-winning Moot Court Team recently took first place in the Evans Constitutional Law Tournament, both for best oral argument and best appellate brief. Washburn regularly partners with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Kansas Court of Appeals by hosting oral arguments each semester in the law school's state-of-the-art Robinson Courtroom. Legal writing students prepare to attend oral arguments by reading the appellate briefs in advance. The law school also sponsors panel presentationswith visiting appellate judges to give students a first-hand account of effective appellate advocacy. In March 2007, Washburn's Center for Excellence in Advocacy will host a symposium titled "The Art of Advocacy: Writing to Win," in conjunction with oral arguments and panel presentations by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.Washburn's legal writing program recently adopted the ALWD citation manual for teaching citation skills in all first-year sections. Every student must demonstrate satisfactory mastery of citation skills each semester on a comprehensive, in-class citation exam. Each professor has a full-time teaching load of two sections per semester and a total of 40-45 students. The law school funds a teaching assistant for each section of 20-23 students. Legal writing professors are eligible for professional development support and research assistance, including summer stipends, to the same extent as all other faculty members.

Our upper-level legal research and writing electives continue to expand. Current options include Writing for Law Practice, Transactional Drafting, Advanced Appellate advocacy, and Advanced Criminal Appellate Advocacy. Washburn has offered Advanced LegalResearch as an elective for many years. Students may elect to take other kinds of advanced legal writing courses by enrolling in Clinical Pretrial Advocacy and several doctrinal seminar electives.Washburn recently adopted the ALWD citation manual for all first-year sections. Each semester, every student must demonstrate satisfactory mastery of citation skills on a comprehensive in-class citation exam.

The Washburn Law Library pioneered Washlaw, one of the most well-known internet portals designed specifically for legal research. Our first-rate law library supports the legal writing program in countless ways, including assistance with research instruction, electronic legal research training, audiovisual and digital media services, and othertechnical support. With the assistance of Washburn Law Library's technical support team, our program recently began hosting DIRCON, the listserv for the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD).Full-time legal writing faculty are continuously engaged in scholarly activities and continuing legal education presentations. Our faculty are actively involved in national legal writing organizations including LWI, ALWD, AALS, and SCRIBES.
For more information, please contact:
Lyn Goering, lyn.goering@washburn.edu
Jeff Jackson, jeffrey.jackson@washburn.edu
Aida Alaka, aida.alaka@washburn.edu
Tonya Kowalski, tony.kowalski@washburn.edu
Andrew Evans, andrew.evans@washburn.edu

Chicago-Kent College of Law

Chicago-Kent's Legal Research and Writing Program is one of the most comprehensive and rigorous in the nation. Students are required to take five graded semesters of Legal Research and Writing, totaling 11 credit hours. LW I introduces students to legal analysis, predictive writing, and legal research; LW II introduces students to persuasive writing and oral advocacy. LW III introduces students to transactional writing, negotiation, and communication with colleagues and clients; while LW IV provides advanced research training in areas such as international and foreign law, empirical and administrative issues, as well as an intensive writing experience in a subject area chosen by the student. Last, the senior seminar provides an opportunity for in-depth research, analysis, and writing on a topic of the student's choice. Students often choose to take more than one seminar. The first-year program, Legal Writing I & II, is taught by full-time LRW faculty. In 2006, Chicago-Kent has twelve full-time LRW faculty. The full-time faculty are a mix of people with clinical tenure (the Director, Associate Director, and four other LRW faculty) and Visiting Assistant Professors (a fellowship program of up to four years). Each full-time LRW faculty member teaches one section of not more than 30 first-year students each semester (faculty with administrative responsibilities teach fewer students), and is assigned a third or fourth year student Teaching Assistant, who aids with research, student counseling, teaching and grading citations, and other duties as agreed. Full-time LRW faculty also teach one other course each year, on a topic of interest to the faculty member and acceptable to the academic dean. Full-time LRW faculty serve on committees, attend faculty meetings and workshops, and are encouraged to participate in the intellectual life of the school. The starting salary for new LRW faculty in August 2006 was $54,000. LW III and LW IV are taught primarily by adjunct faculty, working with the program Director and dual-degreed Reference Librarians. Additionally, from time to time one of the long-term full-time LRW faculty "rotates up" and teaches in the second-year of the program. Several Clinical faculty members and the Library Director also teach LW III or LW IV. Seminars are taught by LRW faculty, by tenured and tenure track faculty, and by adjunct faculty.

Chicago-Kent also has a Director of Appellate Advocacy with clinical tenure and a full-time faculty member who works with international LL.M. students. Contact person for further information about the program:Mary Rose StrubbeProfessor of Legal Research and WritingDirector, Legal Research and Writing ProgramAssistant Director, Institute for Law and the WorkplaceChicago-Kent College of Law(312) 906-5288, mstrubbe@kentlaw.edu. For more information on the program, go to: www.kentlaw.edu/academics/lrw/

The University of Tennessee College of Law

The legal writing program at The University of Tennessee College of Law is one of the cornerstones of the College=s academic program and demonstrates the College's commitment to teaching and training students to be excellent lawyers.

The writing program includes both required and elective courses. In courses that fulfill writing requirements, students create documents that give advice, present arguments on behalf of clients, specify the terms of contracts or other instruments, and present scholarly analysis of legal issues. In elective courses throughout the curriculum, students prepare professional documents of all types.

In the first year, students take a 6-unit, graded sequence (Legal Process I and Legal Process II ) taught by full-time tenured or tenure-track law professors and by practicing attorneys. Working closely with the classroom teachers, a Ph.D. writing specialist helps each student identify writing strengths and weaknesses (as demonstrated in a diagnostic essay assignment completed by each in-coming first-year student or in documents written for Legal Process classes) and offers individual tutoring and a series of writing workshops to all students who wish to improve their writing skills. Reference librarians teach classes in legal research and work with Legal Process teachers on writing and research assignments.

After the first year of law school, students continue to develop their writing and research skills through two upper-level writing requirements. Through the Planning and Drafting requirement, students learn to plan and draft documents, such as contracts, governing the future conduct of clients and others. The Expository Writing requirement focuses on developing critical analysis skills through researching and writing a scholarly research paper on a subject chosen by the student. Students may satisfy the upper-level writing requirements through a variety of courses and independent projects. Many students elect to take more than one course that satisfies each of these requirements.

Beyond the required courses, opportunities to gain experience in preparing professional documents are available throughout the curriculum, particularly in practice-oriented courses offered as part of the Advocacy and Business Transactions concentrations. Finally, the College of Law's Moot Court Program and its three student-edited journals B the Tennessee Law Review, Transactions, and the Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy B offer additional exciting opportunities to gain realistic, professional experiences in legal writing.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

When Thomas Jefferson's legal writing program began in 1993, it was one of the first in the country to be taught primarily by tenured and tenure-track faculty members and to draw extensively on thinking, learning, writing, and teaching methods from other disciplines. Today, the program incorporates practices from benchmark legal writing programs, learning and teaching experts, and fields including rhetoric, composition, literature, education, and psychology. For students, this means that they will engage in solving increasingly complex legal problems as they are introduced to and then begin to master the essential lawyering skills of analysis; reasoning by induction, deduction, and analogy; research; and written and oral communication and persuasion.

The first year of the curriculum is taught by a team of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members augmented by a group of experienced practitioners. The full-time faculty members have varied teaching backgrounds, extensive law practice experience, and diverse scholarly interests ranging from literary and rhetorical theory to world trade regulation and social security. The school's commitment to hiring full-time tenure-track faculty members to teach legal writing allows professors to develop their scholarship interests as well as to bring into the classroom their deepening experience and understanding of the teaching and the practice of legal writing. Because the legal writing faculty at Thomas Jefferson includes teachers who have become expert in a number of fields through their practice, their teaching, and their scholarship, they are well qualified to help students begin to construct a foundation for their own practice of law.

The legal writing curriculum is designed to help prepare graduates to become accomplished and productive attorneys by equipping them with critical skills, acquainting them with social and ethical responsibilities, and introducing them to a range of practice settings. The four-unit Legal Writing I course in the first semester includes a sequenced series of skill exercises, practice memos, and drafts as well as two graded memos. The three-unit Legal Writing II course, offered in the second semester, includes similar practice and draft opportunities as well as a trial brief, an appellate brief, and associated oral argument experiences. The upperlevel writing requirement can be satisfied by choosing one from a menu of courses including business drafting, civil law and motion practice, criminal motion practice, advanced appellate advocacy, and legal drafting or by choosing a doctrinal course requiring an academic paper that satisfies standard criteria.There is no director. Those teaching the legal writing courses have agreed on general goals and guidelines for the curriculum. For more information, visit the website, http://legalwriting.tjsl.edu.Contact: Linda L. Berger, Professor (directorless program) 619-374-6933, lberger@tjsl.edu

GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

Golden Gate has a comprehensive, three-semester writing and research program. In the Fall of the first year, students take Writing & Research I (two credits), which surveys legal methods and systems, develops students’ skills in analyzing statutory and decisional law, and introduces students to prescriptive legal writing. In the Spring, students take Writing & Research II (one credit), which introduces persuasive writing. A tenure-track director, two full-time instructors, and experienced adjunct professors staff the first-year program. Each class section is limited to 14 to 18 students. The course is graded on the same curve used for all first-year required courses.

Second-year students take Appellate Advocacy (two credits). In this class, students write a 20-page, two-issue appellate brief and argue to a panel of attorneys acting as judges. The course culminates in a voluntary, in-house competition. The second-year program is staffed by a tenure-track director and adjunct professors, all of whom are experienced appellate practitioners. Class size ranges from 10 to 14 students. The course is graded on the same curve used for all second-year required courses.

For more information contact Prof. Leslie Rose at (415) 442-6645 or lrose@ggu.edu

Pace Law School

Description of Program: The legal writing program at Pace integrates legal research and writing with substantive criminal law, and in so doing integrates the multiple aspects of a lawyer's professional life. The first year course is a two semester, 6 credit course, that is taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty. Each section of Crim Law/Legal Analysis andWriting has about 20 students. Students learn about the elements of crimes and the role of punishment along with the effective expression of legal analysis, the operation of the court system, the concept of representing a client, and the problems engendered by that professional responsibility. The students learn the challenges of thinking in a logical and organized fashion, statutory analysis, legal research, citation, the use of authority, the importance of facts, and the ability to be self-critical. The students are exposed to the "Socratic method" in a small section, as well as a problem-solving approach that includes collaborative exercises in drafting, research, interviewing, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution. Over the course of the year, each student drafts at least six pieces of writing in the area of criminal law, some persuasive and some predictive. Each piece is extensively critiqued by the full-time faculty member through both written comments and oral conferences.

E-Mail address of someone who can answer questions: Michelle Simon(MSimon@law.pace.edu )Tom McDonnell (TMcDonnell@law.pace.edu )

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Loyola’s Legal Research & Writing Program is designed to achieve one objective: to train students in the analytic, research and communication skills necessary to excel in the practice of law. To accomplish this, Loyola has assembled a professional LRW faculty, who guide sections of 25-30 first-year students through a graded, year-long, three-unit introduction to legal analysis, research and writing.

* The LRW Faculty

Loyola’s Legal Research & Writing faculty is comprised of eight full-time associate and full clinical professors, all with strong academic credentials, solid practice experience, and a commitment to teaching as a career. Led by Director Arnold Siegel, who joined the Loyola faculty in 1977, our instructors include:

o graduates of Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown, UCLA and Loyola law schools;

o former instructors at the UCLA, Chicago-Kent, Whittier, Southwestern University and University of San Diego law schools;

o former editors of the Columbia Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems and the Southwestern University Law Review; and

o lawyers with a range of practice experience, in both the public and private sectors and in firms ranging from solo practice to multinational firms.

The LRW faculty is initially hired on a one-year contract, and on renewable three-year contracts thereafter, and participates in all faculty decision making except matters relating to tenure and tenure-track appointments. In addition to Legal Research & Writing, the LRW faculty teach the upper class course in Ethical Lawyering, and may teach other upper class courses depending on the interests of the faculty member and the needs of the law school. For example, LRW faculty members currently teach Legal Drafting, Negotiations, Trial Advocacy and Family Law.

* The Legal Research & Writing Program

First-year students begin their training with a demanding, six-week introduction to legal analysis and legal writing that culminates in their first office memorandum. They spend the next eight weeks in intensive instruction in legal research, where they master practical research techniques for both primary and secondary authority. We emphasize an integrated approach to using print and online resources.

In the Spring term, students work on increasingly complex legal problems. Their first Spring project is a second office memorandum that requires students to use primary evidentiary materials to (a) define the legal issue presented; (b) research and select authority to resolve that issue; (c) marshal the evidence and inferences therefrom to build factual arguments; (d) analyze the facts and law to predict how a court would resolve the issue; and (e) embody this relatively complex analysis in a professionally crafted and presented document.

The final first-year project is a persuasive trial court brief (which we believe better prepares our students for their actual experience than an appellate brief). Based on declarations and documentary evidence, students must research and draft a memorandum of points and authorities supporting or opposing a motion, which they then argue against another first-year student before an alumnus judge.

* The Ethical Lawyering Course

Skills instruction continues in the students’ second year with Loyola’s required three-unit course in Ethical Lawyering. Taught in small sections, EL combines instruction in Professional Responsibility with practical experience in client interviewing and counseling. Students elicit the facts relevant to their clients’ legal problems through simulated interviewing sessions, research the applicable law, and advise their clients accordingly. Students draft an office memorandum analyzing the facts and law relating to their clients’ problems, and a client letter memorializing their legal advice.

For additional information, please contact Arnold Siegel at arnold.siegel@lls.edu.

Northwestern University School of Law

The CLR Program is the first-year required course at Northwestern University School of Law. Northwestern also has advanced research and advanced writing electives. CLR is a two-semester course that provides 2 credits each semester, for a total of 4 credits, which count in the GPA. We have 9 faculty teaching the first years, with an average class size of just under 30 students per professor. This year we also have an ESL coordinator for our non-native English speakers. Our faculty serve on various faculty committees but do not have a vote. Every member of the CLR faculty, including the Director is on a one-year, renewable contract. We are called Clinical Assistant, Associate or full Professors. The promotion to Clinical Associate Professor is made by the Dean on recommendation of the Director. The promotion from Clinical Associate Professor to Clinical Professor is done only after a full faculty review with class observations, student interviews, review of publications and letters of support from colleagues in the field.

The first semester focuses on teaching legal analysis, written and oral communication, research and citation. The students write an ungraded law/fact application and two graded memos, each of which is rewritten, for a total of 4 graded memos. Some of our faculty add other things such as client letters or role plays for client interviews or reports to partners. Second semester the students write two appellate briefs. We pick one topic which carries us through the entire semester. All the students write first an appellant’s brief on that topic and then an appellee’s brief. We end the semester with a noncompetitive moot court. This year, for the first time we will be adding a three-session basic contract drafting component to our second semester.

Judy Rosenbaum
Director of Communication & Legal Reasoning
Northwestern University School of Law
357 East Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
312.503.8943 (v) 312.503.2035 (fax)
http://www.blogger.com/app/j-rosenbaum2@law.northwestern.edu

University of Nebraska (UNL) College of Law

UNL has a required six-credit-hour first-year LRW program in which our 140 first-year students are taught legal writing by ten Adjunct Instructors, many of them with significant legal writing teaching experience, and all of them with significant legal writing talent. During the first five or six weeks, students study basic legal method, writing style, and citation form. Each week, all students submit written exercises, which their instructors critique but do not grade. Those exercises are all organized around the same legal problem; each exercise is a slightly more sophisticated part of the office memo a lawyer might write analyzing that problem. After the last of those exercises, the students are assigned a different Closed Universe memo problem, and are given two weeks to produce a 9-11 page memo analyzing the problem. While the instructors grade those memos, the students spend four weeks studying bibliographic legal research. They finish the semester with a 9-11 page Open Universe memo problem, giving them three weeks to research and write the memo.

During the second semester, the students work on a single Moot Court issue all semester; they start by writing a third Office Memo, again about 9-12 pages in length, then turn that into a complete Appellate Brief, and finally conduct a week of practice oral argument and a week of final oral argument. Students assemble their briefs in teams of two, each taking a separate issue on their particular appeal; the same teams conduct oral argument. By the end of the year in Legal Writing, students have typically produced 50-65 pages of fairly formal, graded legal writing (3 office memos and an appellate brief), and another 15-25 pages of written exercises.

The only upper-class writing requirement is that all students take a seminar in which they are required to produce a long research paper. Nonetheless, many students take upper-class electives with substantial writing components; there are probably 10-15 such other courses in the curriculum, including one pure writing elective, “Style and Composition in Legal Writing.”

For further information, contact the Director of Legal Writing, Professor Craig Lawson, at 402-472-1247, or clawson1@unl.edu.

Boston College Law School, Newton, Massachusetts

At Boston College Law School, Legal Reasoning, Research & Writing (LRR&W) is a core course in the first-year curriculum, and is viewed as such by the Law School faculty as a whole. A two-semester, five-credit graded course, LRR&W teaches students a sophisticated methodology for legal problem-solving by integrating the skills of legal analysis, research, and communication. In particular, the course’s contextual, problem-centered approach for teaching legal analysis is specifically designed to complement the teaching of legal analysis in the other courses in the first-year curriculum. Over the course of the year, each student receives extensive individual written and oral feedback on several major writing assignments as well as on interim drafts. Because of this curriculum, Boston law firms report that BCLS students come exceptionally well-prepared to analyze and write about legal problems. While individual professors in the program have autonomy in developing curriculum and choosing teaching methodologies, the program is characterized by collegiality and a very high degree of collaboration. It is also characterized by a process of continual exploration and revision, which in recent years has focused on incorporating technology into the classroom and feedback on written work. This process is encouraged by the stability and continuity of the LRR&W Program, as well as by the strong support of the law school administration, which includes grants for summer research.

The LRR&W program is staffed by a teaching Director, Jane Kent Gionfriddo, who plays a largely facilitative role in administering the program, and five additional full-time professors: Dan Barnett, Joan Blum, Mary Ann Chirba-Martin, Elisabeth Keller, and Judith Tracy. Students are taught in sections of between 40 and 45 students. Professor Gionfriddo has taught in the program for 23 years and administered it for 20. The average service of the five other faculty members is 12 years. Members of the professional library staff, who have law degrees in addition to their graduate degrees in library and information science, co-teach the segments of the curriculum that introduce legal research sources and techniques, and research—both print and on-line—is integrated throughout the year-long curriculum. LRR&W professors, like most faculty members in the Law School’s clinics, are long-term contract members of the faculty who have a form of job security “substantially similar to tenure.” See ABA Standard 405(c). LRR&W professors are well-integrated into the general faculty community. They serve as full members of law school committees and vote at faculty meetings on most issues. Two LRR&W professors have received the University-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, and one professor has received a Law School award for teaching excellence. Three LRR&W professors have served on the Board of Directors of the Legal Writing Institute; Professor Jane Gionfriddo was the Institute’s President from 2000 to 2002. Several members of the Program were co-editors of the Institute’s semi-annual newsletter, The Second Draft, from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, two LRR&W professors (neither of whom is the Director) served as Chair of the AALS section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research; one was on the Planning Committee for the 2003 AALS Workshop for New Law Teachers and chaired the Planning Committee for the 2003 AALS Workshop for New Teachers of Legal Writing. Members of the LRR&W faculty have also been active in the New England Legal Writing Consortium, a regional organization of legal writing faculty that holds semi-annual meetings on curriculum and pedagogy; one was a founding member. The Law School hosted the December 2001 meeting of the Consortium, which was attended by over 40 participants from 11 law schools, and it is scheduled to host the next meeting in December 2004. Both these meetings were hands-on workshops requiring participants to prepare material beforehand and discuss it with other colleagues in small groups at the conference. Finally, LRR&W professors have done extensive consulting work at other law schools and at many law firms in Massachusetts.

Contact Person: Jane Kent Gionfriddo, Associate Professor and Director of Legal Reasoning, Research & Writing; 617-552-4358

University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Law

At Mizzou, LR&W is a graded, two-semester, four-credit program, with 150 first-year students divided into eight small sections (with 19 to 20 students in each). The fall semester focuses on print research and predictive writing. The first writing assignment requires students to attend court and report on the proceedings. After that court visit report, students learn to write a law office memorandum by writing a shorter CRAAC assignment and two pass-fail, open-universe memoranda (usually based on state law issues). Students work in pairs on these early assignments, but work alone when writing the final, graded memorandum (usually based on a federal statutory issue). Students receive detailed written critiques of their work and are required to attend at least two conferences with their professor to discuss their writing. The second semester focuses on persuasive writing, oral advocacy, and CALR. Students write a complaint, an answer, a motion for summary judgment (with suggestions in support), and an appellate brief. The early assignments are pass-fail, and the later assignments are graded. Students also present two oral arguments, one for a trial court and one for an appellate court.

LR&W courses are taught by three full-time legal writing professors and one adjunct. The adjunct faculty member in recent years (and again this year) has been a Missouri Assistant Attorney General who is able to draw from substantial practice experience. In coordination with the legal writing faculty, five law librarians teach research strategies by making presentations in the LR&W classrooms, assisting small groups of students with hands-on assignments in the library, and meeting one-on-one with every student. The full-time legal writing faculty members have long-term contracts and voting rights (including a vote on the hiring of tenure-track faculty). The law school provides a Teaching Assistant for each section of legal writing, and separate Research Assistants are available for any full-time legal writing faculty member who has scholarly interests requiring research assistance. Full-time legal writing professors have faculty accounts for travel and are eligible for summer research grants.

Anyone interested in more information about the Legal Writing Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia should feel free to e-mail the director, Professor Melody Daily, at dailyma@missouri.edu.

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF LAW

Three full-time Legal Research and Writing professors teach the required first-year legal research and writing course. Each professor is eligible for the equivalent of 405(c) status after six years (two of the current legal writing professors have achieved that status) as well as promotion to the rank of Professor (currently, two have achieved that rank). The legal writing professors participate fully in the academic and administrative life of the law school, including voting rights (save for tenure decisions), law school committee assignments, and university-wide committee work. Our three professors have a combined 34 years of experience in teaching legal research and writing and 20 collective years of practice in law firms. Upperclass electives taught by them include Advanced Legal Writing, Pre-trial Litigation, Ethics, Professional Responsibility, Germs and Justice, and Biomedical Ethics and the Law. Publications include articles on bioethics and a CD-rom multimedia lecture series on the legal system.
Each legal writing professor teaches four sections of 30 students and works closely with upperclass students (Dillard Fellows) who assist in critiquing the students’ assignments and in holding conferences with each student. Students submit 11 assignments in the fall semester, including research exercises (tied in to the memoranda assignments), citation exercises, preliminary outlines, and three memoranda of increasing length and complexity. Two of the memoranda assignments require a rewrite. In the spring semester, the focus is on appellate advocacy. The students first submit an appellate brief (a draft and rewrite) and then present an oral argument in front of a panel of three judges consisting of a Dillard Fellow and two alumni/professors. The first-year legal writing curriculum is augmented by upper-class advocacy, researching, and oral communication courses.

Contact person: D. Ruth Buck, Professor, Legal Research & Writing; 434-924-1042; drb7c@virginia.edu.

Marquette University Law School

Students at Marquette are required to take six credits of legal writing during their first year. During the first semester, the course focuses on predictive writing. Students write two closed research office memoranda; they submit a draft and a re-write of each memorandum. Each student has an individual conference with his or her professor before submitting the rewritten version of the memo. Students also complete two research assignments, one relating to each office memorandum. Most professors also give a final quiz covering plagiarism, principles of authority, citation, grammar, punctuation, and usage. During the spring semester, the focus switches to persuasion. Students write two open research trial court briefs. Again, each assignment consists of a draft and a re-write, and students confer individually with their professors during each assignment sequence. During the spring semester, students also complete two research reports documenting their research process and results. During the second or third year, students are required to complete an upper-level academic writing requirement. Beginning next semester, the legal writing professors will also begin offering advanced legal writing courses (electives) in topics of their choosing. We have offered advanced legal writing during the summer session as well.

In order to ensure the autonomy of each legal writing faculty member, Marquette does not have a director but rather has a program staffed by six full-time writing professors. Each professor has approximately 40-45 students, and each professor has complete autonomy as to the course curriculum. The writing professors are initially given one-year renewable contracts but are eligible for three-year contracts after completing five years on the faculty. Legal writing professors serve on all law school committees, attend faculty meetings, and are permitted to vote on all matters other than hiring and promotion of tenure-track faculty. They are eligible to receive summer research stipends and receive the same faculty development funds as the tenured and tenure-track faculty. Although scholarship is not required of the writing faculty, the administration supports scholarship.

E-mail contact: Alison Julien
Alison.Julien@marquette.edu

Cumberland School of Law, Samford University

Starting on the first day of orientation, the acronym “LLR” becomes a part of every Cumberland student’s lexicon. It stands for “Lawyering and Legal Reasoning,” a six-hour graded course in the first year of law school that emphasizes the writing and persuasive skills that all lawyers must possess—whether their practice takes them to the courtroom or to the boardroom. Each LLR section of 20 to 22 students is paired with another and assigned a hypothetical case for the year. One section takes the plaintiff’s side, the other the defense, and the students in each section prepare each side of the case as it might be prepared in the “real” world. This includes: 1) interviewing the client; 2) preparing a legal memorandum based on the student’s research into the issues that the client’s case presents; 3) drafting the appropriate pleadings; 4) solving a discovery issue; 5) filing a motion for a summary judgment [or response] with accompanying trial brief; and 6) writing an appellate brief on appeal from a summary judgment. Along the way, the students also correspond with the client, enter into settlement negotiations (including drafting a settlement agreement) and argue their respective positions before mock trial and appellate courts.
Cumberland believes LLR works because it encourages students to stop thinking like students and start thinking like lawyers almost from their first day at law school. And while the practical aspects of legal research and writing are emphasized, theoretical issues are not slighted either: in fact, before being introduced to their “clients” and undergoing what is affectionately known as “boot camp”—a rigorous introduction to legal research methods and citation forms—the students are asked to read, discuss, and respond in writing to the issues presented by Lon Fuller’s classic article on the nature of judicial reasoning, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, as introduced and re-imagined in Peter Suber’s book, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions. Cumberland also believes LLR works because its students believe it works too—for instance, in the current (2004) edition of Princeton Review’s The Best 117 Law Schools, which is based on student surveys, Cumberland was ranked fourth in the nation in the quality of its professors, and LLR was singled out in particular: “[s]tudents praise ‘Lawyering and Legal Reasoning,’ a first year class that ‘teaches practical skills, following a mock case from the complaint and discovery phases to appellate.’” The Review also noted that “[s]tudents love to point out that ‘Cumberland’s Dean, Judge John Carroll, actually teaches . . . first year writing classes.’” Although Judge Carroll has taken a one-year hiatus in teaching LLR for 2004-05, the course is taught by Cumberland’s “regular” faculty. The single adjunct (an adjunct by choice) also teaches a substantive course in the law school. In short, LLR works at Cumberland because the academic faculty is just as enthusiastic about the program as are the students that it serves.

For further information, contact LLR Director Belle H. Stoddard at:
bhstodda@samford.edu

See also Cumberland’s website at: http://cumberland.samford.edu

Hamline University School of Law

# of Full Time Instructors: 6

Faculty Structure: One Director (teaches 1/2 class load) and 5 full-time faculty

Faculty Titles: Director of Legal Writing or Legal Writing Instructor

Contracts (tenure not available)
· Director: 3 year rolling (405(c) status)
· 2 Instructors: 3 year rolling (contracts granted this year; status not clear at this time)
· 3 Instructors: One-year contracts.

Required time teaching or other criteria before eligible for 3-year rolling contracts: Not clear at this time.

Years current faculty have taught LRW at Hamline (excluding current year): 2-14 years

Starting Salary: $33,000

Additional Professional Support: $1,000 per year professional development funds (The school does not pay for attorney registration fees.)
$500 per year per Instructor for student research TA’s

Number of Required Semesters: 2 (first year only)

Advanced courses offered: None. Students must take a topical seminar course and write a paper for it, but there are no advanced Legal Writing courses currently available.

Credits per semester: 2 each semester

Class size: Maximum of 48 students per Instructor; taught in 2 class sections

Graded Fall Semester assignments:
One-Case Legal Analysis Exercise; Closed Memorandum; Research Memorandum

Research Labs: During the first semester students are also required to participate in Research Labs taught by student TA’s and graded by the TA’s. These TA’s are closely guided by one of the Instructors. The lab assignments are created by that same Instructor in conjunction with the Law Library staff.

Graded Spring Semester Assignments: Client Letter; Appellate Brief; Oral Argument

Feedback Opportunities other than grading: At least one private tutorial/conference of 30-60 minutes with the Instructor before each written assignment. (1 tutorial before the Closed Memo; 2 tutorials before the Research Memo and Appellate Brief)

Rewriting of assignments: None. The program focuses on feedback prior to grading.

Additional Information: Based on anecdotal evidence from local judges and the Career Services Office, Hamline graduates are preferred as judicial clerks. Once a Hamline grad has clerked for an out-of-state judge, those judges generally contact Hamline in the future before hiring other candidates.

Contact Information
Alice Silkey, Director of Legal Writing
651-523-3012 or asilkey@hamline.edu

University of Florida Levin College of Law

Faculty
Henry T. Wihnyk, J.D., LL.M., Legal Skills Professor and Director
Tracy Rambo, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Leanne Pflaum, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Patricia Thomson, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Betsy Ruff, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Diane Tomlinson, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Joseph Jackson, J.D., Legal Skills Professor
Holly Derenthal, J.D., Adjunct Legal Skills Professor

Department Faculty’s Status
Legal Skills Professors serve under renewable nine-month, long-term contracts. A newly hired Legal Skills Professor is appointed for a single academic term. The appointment may be renewed no more than four times. In the third year of teaching the Legal Skills Professor is eligible to be appointed for a three-year term. In the sixth year of teaching the Legal Skills Professor is eligible to be appointed for renewable five-year contracts.

Legal Skills Professors are entitled to vote at law faculty meetings on all issues except tenure-track faculty promotion, appointments, and tenure. Legal Skills Professors serve and vote on law faculty committees.

Department Goals
The Florida Bar and the ABA have made clear that lawyering skills must be a significant element of a law student’s preparation for practice. The Legal Research, Writing and Appellate Advocacy Department’s goal is to provide to our students the means to master these vital lawyering skills. In three courses, Legal Research and Writing, Appellate Advocacy and Advanced Techniques in Appellate Advocacy, we achieve this goal by training our students:

(1) To understand and apply the doctrine of stare decisis;
(2) To analyze and solve legal problems using critical legal reasoning;
(3) To write clearly, accurately, concisely, and persuasively;
(4) To understand and use manual and electronic legal research tools;
(5) To prepare professionally competent legal memoranda, appellate briefs and other documents;
(6) To present persuasive oral arguments; and
(7)To employ professional standards and ethics.

Curriculum
-Legal Research & Writing
Legal Research and Writing is the first semester course of the first year writing program. It is a two-credit, pass/fail class. Each writing professor, assisted by student teaching assistants, teaches approximately 50 students. The writing professors and Director teach all classes, prepare at least two legal problems each semester on which most assignments are based, meet weekly with the teaching assistants, grade student papers, and conduct student conferences.

The teaching assistants conduct hands-on legal research training, conduct some of the conferencing and, depending upon the writing professor, do some grading, all of which is reviewed by the writing professor.

The course focuses on teaching the students to analyze a legal problem, to research the law for the legal problem, and to write an office memorandum incorporating their research and analysis.
-Appellate Advocacy
Appellate Advocacy , the second semester course of the first year writing program, is a two-credit, pass/fail course. Each faculty member, assisted by teaching assistants, teaches approximately 50 Appellate Advocacy students.

The teaching assistants conduct hands-on legal research training, conduct some of the conferencing and, depending upon the writing professor, do some grading, all of which is reviewed by the writing professor.

The focus of the course is on persuasive writing. An appellate brief is the vehicle used to demonstrate the principles of persuasive writing. The course is designed to assist the students in applying the skills of research and writing (which they acquire in the first half of the two semester writing program) and their knowledge of substantive law, to develop effective, persuasive writing skills.

-Advanced Legal Research & Writing, Appellate Advocacy
This is the course each writing professor teaches to the Department’s teaching assistants. The class meets once per week, is graded providing each student a total of 3 credits over two semesters. In this course we require the teaching assistants to complete many of the assignments their students prepare and to assist the writing professors in preparing topics and materials for the students. The teaching assistants prepare and present a variety of demonstrations to the students. The teaching assistants also help the writing professor’s comment on student papers and conduct conferences. The writing professors read and provide written and oral comments on all projects completed by the teaching assistants.

-Advanced Techniques in Appellate Advocacy
Advanced Techniques in Appellate Advocacy provides in-depth, vigorous training in written and oral persuasive legal analysis techniques. Students are required to prepare several drafts of arguments and present at several oral arguments focusing on the issues argued in the briefs.

Students also prepare several short writing assignments designed to improve writing, legal analysis and advocacy skills. The primary text is Practicing Persuasive Writing and Oral Advocacy Case File 2 by David Miller. I also provide materials comprising selections from briefs and oral arguments in landmark and other appellate cases for the students to analyze and critique.

WIDENER UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware has a rigorously graded three-semester Legal Methods program in which our more than 300 first year students take Legal Methods I and II, followed by Legal Methods III in either semester of their second year. In all three semesters, class size is approximately twenty-five students; full-time professors normally teach two sections each semester. In our first year program, we use full-time Legal Methods professors, occasionally adding carefully selected adjuncts when enrollment requires creation of additional Legal Methods sections. In our third semester program, a blend of full-time Legal Methods professors, adjuncts, and full-time doctrinal professors teach sections of approximately twenty-five students. All eleven of our full-time Legal Methods professors, and our tenured director, practiced law before teaching. Our group includes professors with law firm, solo practice, public defender, and in-house counsel experience. Three of us clerked for federal district court judges; one of these three also clerked for two judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Five of us have published in law reviews or other law-related publications. We are proud of our diversity; our ranks include two African Americans, two men, and the current President of the Hispanic Bar Association of Pennsylvania. We have no cap on the number of years of service; our most recent turnover occurred when two professors moved on to tenure track, doctrinal positions—one of them here.

Our Legal Methods faculty collaboratively designed and continually updates a curriculum in which each semester’s lessons build upon and deepen students’ prior writing experiences. The first semester strongly emphasizes case reading and analytical skills. We work through exercises introducing and practicing the production of structured legal analysis generated through various case synthesis techniques. This work culminates in application of these skills to the cases to be used in the students’ first graded writing assignment, which is a closed memorandum. Before the closed memoranda are due, students submit drafts of their discussion sections; professors review and provide feedback on those drafts to guide students’ progress in case reading, synthesis, and analytic structure. Upon completion of the closed memoranda, we turn to teaching research skills as a natural extension of analytic skills. As they work on their second graded project for the first semester—a research memorandum—students learn case research techniques from their Legal Methods professors and apply them to their memoranda by working through a research roadmap that is assigned with the open memorandum. These roadmaps generically guide students through the steps of an organized research process, simultaneously modeling and keeping students on track with that process. Completed research steps are discussed in class sessions so that professors can efficiently guide and give feedback to students as they work on their research. In the second semester, we introduce persuasive writing skills and computer assisted as well as statutory research; we also continue work on analytic and synthesis skills in the context of persuasion with multiple classroom writing experiences and exercises. The semester’s main graded project is an appellate brief. Midway through the brief-writing process, we devote a week to individual conferences in which every student has an “oral report to the partner” experience. In these one-on-one sessions with their professors, students must explain their research progress and prospective arguments. This exercise permits us to identify and guide students who are having difficulty with the assignment, and gives students a “real practice” simulation. At the second semester’s end, all students engage in oral arguments judged by alumni, many of whom have judged and mentored our students for years. In the third semester, we focus on acculturating students to law practice. Students begin the semester with a graded client letter assignment. Within the scope of this assignment, they perform legal research to prepare for and conduct a simulated client interview. Through the interview, they collect the facts they need to draft the letter. After students submit their client letters, they continue work on the same “matter” with a complex memorandum of law in support of or opposition to a motion for summary judgment. This closed universe project, which includes extensive simulated materials such as business records, documents, deposition testimony, and expert reports, is designed to deepen students’ mastery of persuasive writing and fact analysis skills. Class sessions concurrent with this project explicitly focus upon these skills.

If you have questions, contact Mary Ellen Maatman, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Legal Methods Program for Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware. My e-mail address is: MaryEllen.Maatman@law.widener.edu.

University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law

First-Year Program Description

Introduction to Law & Lawyering Processes is a five credit, required first year, two-semester course, and taught in seven sections of 25-30 students each. Each student receives extensive written comments on five writing assignments and meets with their faculty in individual conferences to review their comments after each assignment.

This course aims to develop in the students the following principal competencies: (1) An understanding of the federal and various state court systems and the nature of differing jurisdictions; (2) understanding legal methodology and legal process; (3) legal reasoning skills (inductive, deductive and analogical); (4) case analysis and case synthesis skills; (5) legal research skills; and (6) legal writing skills.

Advanced Legal Writing Offerings

UMKC has offered Advanced Legal Writing courses since 1991. These courses have been overbooked each semester due to student demand. These are seminar courses designed to focus on specific aspects of writing in practice. This year, we are pleased to offer the most sections and the most variety to our students in response to students needs. These include Litigation Drafting -- Civil; Litigation Drafting – Criminal; and Practical Legal Skills, a course designed for the students headed to solo or a small firm general practice. Adjunct faculty teaching some of these sections include two federal magistrate judges. In the past, we have also offered Corporate Drafting. Many of the substantive courses at UMKC also include an advanced writing component including Estate Planning and Drafting and Real Estate Transactions

Faculty Experience and Status

UMKC legal writing faculty are some of the most experienced faculty as a whole than most other law schools. Legal writing faculty graduated in the top of their law school classes and include former federal judicial law clerks, an assistant attorney general, and a former high school English teacher and administrator. Their practice experience ranges from a large firm with a national products liability practice to a mid-sized regional firm with extensive medical malpractice defense work to a small firm with a general practice to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office.

UMKC legal writing faculty have benefited from uncapped contracts since 1989. With renewable long-term contracts, the faculty have a combined law school teaching experience of over thirty years. With this level of experience, the UMKC legal writing faculty spearheaded the development of regional writing conferences by organizing the first of its kind, the Central Region Lawyering Skills Conference in the Fall of 1999. UMKC legal writing faculty routinely present at regional and national legal writing conferences. Their teaching techniques and writing problems have been utilized by schools across the nation.

For more information please visit our website at http://www1.law.umkc.edu/Academic/LWP/index.html

or contact:
Prof. Wanda M. Temm
Director of Legal Writing
UMKC School of Law
Kansas City, Missouri
816-235-5311
temmw@umkc.edu

THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI

First-year law students at the University of Mississippi take six hours of legal research and writing over two semesters.
· The first semester focuses on objective analysis and writing. Students draft two objective memoranda. A significant portion of the class time is spent revising and editing student drafts of memorandum segments. This is done in small student groups and with the whole class. Students submit a first draft for review, meet with their professors to discuss the critiques of their papers, and then submit a rewrite to be graded. The second memorandum is submitted for a grade without the benefit of a rewrite (though students rewrite one issue of the second memorandum during the second semester.)
o The average class size for the writing component of the class is 43 students. Four full time legal research and writing professors teach this component. Although they do not have long-term contracts, with the exception of adding professors, there has been no turnover during the past three years and there is no expectation of turnover during the immediate future. LRW professors can attend faculty meetings (but not vote), serve on committees (but not vote), and teach doctrinal courses. Three of the four LRW professors possess significant legal experience. The director was a partner in a commercial litigation boutique, and founded and was the first executive director of a state public defender’s office providing post-conviction representation to death row inmates. Another professor worked in legal services for many years and then started a private practice. A third has worked in a firm and then founded a new one providing intellectual property and contract advice to musicians and visual artists. Although the fourth professor has no “real world” experience, he has taught legal research and writing in this program for five years.
o The average class size for the research component of the class is 22 students. The classes are taught by two reference librarians and by an adjunct professor. The director of the law library designs this component. The research and writing components of the course are tightly integrated. Reference librarians provide feedback on the research aspects of proposed memoranda topics. Further, front pages of the authorities used to locate the universe of closed memorandum cases are incorporated into the research classes to illustrate the research process.


· During the second semester, the students: rewrite one issue from the open memo of the preceding semester; prepare a client letter regarding one issue in the appellate brief; prepare an appellate brief; keep time sheets documenting the time spent researching and writing the appellate brief; and “reverse engineer” a research problem to illustrate their familiarity with the research process (they are provided a statute, and then must define a legal issue and create a line of secondary and primary authorities leading to the issue’s answer).
· Advanced research is regularly offered. Advanced writing is occasionally offered.
· Students must complete one upper level course with a “significant writing” requirement.

During a recent long-term planning session, tenured faculty identified the following goals for the LRW program:
· Continue to reduce the class size of LRW classes;
· Integrate a first-year doctrinal class with LRW; and
· Expand the advanced research and writing class offerings.
Additionally, the faculty agreed to support “Writing Across the Curriculum” and to study the faculty status of LRW professors.

Address any questions regarding the program to Jack Williams at cjxn@olemiss.edu.

SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER

Southern University is a historically black state university. The Law Center's mission is to provide legal educational opportunites to a diverse and racially balanced student body and maintain its historic tradition of providing legal educational opportunities to under-represented racial, ethnic, and economic groups. SULC has faced the challenge of students who enter law school with less than perfect foundations by strenghtening its legal writing and research requirements and offering small classes (35 to 40 students for freshmen, 10 to 15 students for 2-Ls), highly qualified full-time professors, legal writing labs, individual conferencing, opportunities for rewriting, and plenty of feedback. First-year students earn a total of five credit hours in legal writing and research. During their first semester, students spend two hours per week in the classroom and library to earn one credit hour in legal research, which is taught by a tenured professor. They also spend three hours per week in legal writing -- two hours in lecture and one hour in lab -- to earn two credit hours. The lecture courses are taught by a tenure-eligible legal writing director, two legal writing instructors with 905(c) status, a visiting professor, and the placement director. Experienced adjuncts teach the labs, which offer weekly writing assignments with immediate feedback. First-year students earn an additional two hours of legal writing credit during the spring semester, again earning two credit hours for three hours of actual writing instruction.

Second-year students are required to earn two additional credit hours in legal writing and may take a one-hour course in advanced legal research as an elective. These courses are taught by a combination of adjuncts and doctrinal faculty. An upper-level elective in appellate advocacy is also offered.

SULC's legal writing faculty members are fully integrated with the doctrinal faculty. They vote at faculty meetings on all issues except tenure and promotion, serve on committees, enjoy offices in the heart of the doctrinal faculty area, and have the same opportunities as doctrinal faculty to attend conferences. For further information, contact Gail S. Stephenson, Director of Legal Writing and Assistant Professor of Law, at gstephenson@sulc.edu or 225-771-4900 ext. 267.

University of Maine School of Law

The Legal Research and Writing Program at the University of Maine is unique in several ways. The program offers integrated legal research and writing instruction, led by a team of two full-time writing professors, two reference librarians, and six third-year students. The two-semester, six-credit program focuses on teaching objective writing in the fall and advocacy in the spring. The first-year class is divided into six writing groups of approximately fourteen students who are taught once a week by a professor, who focuses on legal analysis and writing skills, and once a week by a third-year legal writing instructor, who works with a reference librarian to teach research, citation, and legal writing skills. Although students turn in individual assignments, they are each assigned a writing partner with whom to collaborate throughout the year. Students are actually required to exchange papers and give each other feedback as a part of the course. We believe that teaching students the skills of collaboration is an important part of our mission.

Involving third-year student instructors who are both outstanding legal writers and role models for the first-year students is a cornerstone of our program. Because of our small class size, students learn in groups no larger than fourteen from both a professor who has experience practicing law and a third-year student who understands the challenges of law school. At the University of Maine, the legal writing instructors are involved in all aspects of the program, not just teaching certain skills like citation. They read the first drafts of student papers and help the students get oriented before the professors read their interim and final drafts.

During the first semester, students are introduced to a case currently on appeal before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. The lawyers actually arguing the appeal come to class to discuss the case with the students, who must write two drafts of a closed universe bench memo on the case. After the bench memos are handed in, the whole class attends the oral argument and talk with the attorneys afterward, right in the courthouse. This program is only possible through the outstanding relationship our program maintains with the Court. Each fall, the director of the program chooses a case from those filed with the Court, and the Clerk of the Court schedules the argument at a time that is convenient for the legal writing class.

While the students are preparing their bench memos, they are learning research skills in preparation for their other assignments in the fall: an open-universe objective memo, based on the research they have been conducting, and a client letter, explaining their conclusions to a hypothetical client. In the fall, students also learn citation through practice sessions--“Citation Feud”--based on the television program “Family Feud.” We also coach them on exam-taking techniques toward the end of the semester.

In the spring, students write a brief and argue a case currently pending in the United States Supreme Court. Panels of lawyers and judges from the community hear their oral arguments and critique their performances. In preparation for Moot Court, several judges always talk to the class, including the Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court, Hon. Leigh I. Saufley, and the Senior Judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, Hon. Frank M. Coffin, both good friends of the school and the Legal Writing Program. Often a Maine lawyer who has argued in the United States Supreme Court will talk to the students as well.

Although Maine is a small, public law school that lacks many of the resources available to larger, private schools, we are proud of the way we have been able to enrich our students’ learning experience by enlisting lawyers and judges from the community to help. In addition, we offer many opportunities for students to meet individually, with their writing partner, or in small groups with the professors in the program. Students are also required to meet once each semester for an individual conference with their writing instructor. This combination of real world wisdom and close personal attention are the hallmarks of our program. Although our faculty does not yet have tenure-track status, the director of the program, now in her tenth year, is on a long-term (five-year) renewable contract. Our other faculty member, the Legal Writing Fellow, is in a two-year capped position.

For more information, contact Prof. Nancy Wanderer (207) 780-4096, wanderer@usm.maine.edu.

EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

The Legal Writing, Research & Advocacy Program at the Emory University School of Law is recognized as an essential part of the skills curriculum. Emory’s LWRA Program comprises two semesters and four credit hours covering the fundamental principles and methods of legal writing, research and advocacy. In the fall semester, students are guided through every step of writing an office memorandum. After receiving written comments on each component of the memo, they produce two complete memoranda on progressively more difficult topics. They receive comprehensive written feedback and meet one-on-one with their instructor before rewriting the second memo for the final grade. Students begin the second semester by working in teams to write a letter to a client about a business-based problem. They also hone their research skills and learn to write persuasively by researching and drafting a brief to a court of appeals. Students then practice their oral argument, receive feedback from their peers and instructor, and get a videotape of their practice. They deliver their final graded argument before a panel of judges composed of professors, lawyers and upper-level students. Each of the six instructors teaches the same group of roughly three dozen students throughout the students’ first year. Teachers work with individual students and student groups during extensive office hours. Emory students also have multiple one-on-one conferences with their instructors and receive frequent, individualized, written critiques of their writing.

The LWRA teachers are experienced attorneys who practiced in the corporate, civil litigation, criminal defense and public interest arenas. In addition to bringing this practical experience to the classroom, instructors use innovative teaching techniques based on active learning. They hold creative sessions that make use of the latest classroom technologies, and class meetings usually incorporate lectures, individual exercises and collaborative work in small groups. LWRA teachers also know that each individual student learns best in his or her own unique way; they design class meetings to present learning opportunities that fit varying learning styles. Several instructors are certified as “Master Teachers” through the Emory University Advisory Council on Teaching. Each LWRA instructor has a professional development fund for travel to conferences and seminars; each also receives a summer stipend for curriculum development and generous funding for research assistants. LWRA teachers serve and vote on faculty committees and receive annual contracts renewable for an unlimited number of years. Combining their practice experience with a commitment to teaching, Emory’s LWRA Program instructors prepare students for the real world of law practice.

E-mail address of person who can answer questions: arector@law.emory.edu

Web page with more information: at http://www.law.emory.edu, click on "Faculty Profiles" to find biographies for each faculty member: Lesley Carroll, Karen Cooper, Nancy Daspit, Beth Edmondson, Anne Rector (program director), Jennifer Romig, Julie Schwartz.

West Virginia University College of Law

The Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing Program at West Virginia University College of Law is a full-year, four-credit program followed by a third semester of Appellate Advocacy. Four full-time faculty members work in the first-year program, each teaching two sections of 20 - 25 students. Thus, the student-teacher ratio is around 1 - 45. LRRW faculty members have ABA Standard 405 (c) status in that they may vote at faculty meetings, may be awarded a five-year contract after two probationary years, and may stay with the institution indefinitely. These faculty members may also (and do) teach other courses. The appellate advocacy course, on the other hand, is taught by a cadre of experienced adjuncts, each of whom is responsible for 16 - 18 students. The school’s Moot Court Board competition occurs during this third semester of writing.

Students in the first-year program spend two months learning basic skills through a pass/fail sequence of writing assignments, each of which must be rewritten until the student "passes" the assignment (with a "pass" being considered "C" level work). The pass/fail assignments include a case brief, a prediction based upon a statute, a prediction based upon a case, and a prediction based upon a synthesis of cases (two to four cases). After all students have "passed" the first four writing assignments, they write two graded documents. The first is a closed universe memo based on the synthesis assignment, while the second is a researched memo based upon West Virginia law. In the second semester, students write a researched memorandum based upon an issue of federal law, and then this memorandum is converted into a motion and supporting brief filed with a trial judge. The students finish the year with oral argument to the trial judge. Grades are awarded at the end of the full year, and any student receiving a grade below "C" must repeat the course. During the third semester, the students work with a different research problem, write a 25-page appellate brief, and end the class with oral argument to a panel of judges.

The College of Law now has a Professional Writing Center, staffed half-time by a writing specialist (non-J.D. English professor) who works with students in the first-year LRRW program. She is assisted by a third-year student who works in the center one day a week. The writing specialist teaches weekly workshops that target grammar, mechanics, and style issues, and all law students are invited to these workshops. However, she also works individually with LRRW students who need more assistance.

Grace Wigal, Director
West Virginia University College of Law
grace.wigal@mail.wvu.edu

The University of Toledo College of Law

Legal Research, Writing and Appellate Advocacy at the University of Toledo College of Law is a two-semester course that integrates the teaching of research and writing. The three-credit fall semester course focuses on predictive writing and fundamentals of research. The one-credit spring semester course covers persuasive writing, oral argument, and more advanced research resources and strategies. In the first semester, students write three memos with one to three rewrites plus numerous short projects; in the second semester they write a trial brief and an appellate brief.

The College is committed to small research and writing sections. The program is staffed by four full time faculty, including a teacher-director, and supplemented by adjuncts as necessary to keep the student-faculty ratio at about 45 students per full-time teacher. Faculty consult frequently to ensure consistency in the students’ learning experience, but teachers are free to develop their own syllabi, problems, and approaches. The legal writing faculty views conferences as major learning opportunities, so students attend conferences during the writing and re-writing phases of each major assignment. Elective upper level legal writing courses include Advanced Appellate Advocacy, Advanced Legal Writing, and Practical Legal Writing.

Full-time legal writing faculty are hired initially for one year. They are re-hired for three- year and then five-year terms. All faculty have professional experience before coming to teach at the College. Faculty receive professional development funds and participate in faculty governance, except for voting on some appointment and promotion issues.

Contact person at the University of Toledo College of Law:
Debbie Mostaghel
419-530-4164
dmostag@utnet.utoledo.edu

Loyola University New Orleans School of Law

Loyola’s Legal Research & Writing Program is run by two tenured professors, one of whom began the rigorous program back in 1986 (Pat Hugg), and the other who joined the faculty to co-direct and teach in the program in 1993 (Mary Garvey Algero). This continuity of direction has helped solidify the program as one that provides students with excellent training in legal research, writing, analysis, and advocacy. During the first year of law studies, students take 4 credit hours, 2 hours of legal research and writing during which they write three objective memoranda, and 2 hours of Moot Court, during which they practice oral skills weekly, write an appellate brief, and make an appellate argument before a three-judge panel. In the past, these courses were taught by professors and adjuncts who had the assistance of teaching assistants. They are now taught by Fellows who teach no more than 40-45 students per semester.

Following the first year of study, students may elect to take the Advanced Legal Writing course in which students write a judicial opinion, a motion and supporting documents, client letters, and a scholarly piece. Law Review students must enroll in the Law Review Practicuum, a five-hour course held during the student’s second year in which scholarly writing and editing is the focus. Students may also elect to enroll in Advanced Legal Research as well as a number of other "skills" courses in which they are required to draft "practical" documents such as contracts and wills. Additional opportunities to sharpen skills include internships with judges, work on one of the school’s four law journals, research assistantships with professors, and service as a teaching assistant for the first year program in the Loyola Law School Writing Lab, which is a resource for first-year law students.

William Mitchell College of Law

William Mitchell students take two required skills courses. First-year students take Writing & Representation: Advice & Persuasion (WRAP), a six-credit, two-semester, graded course. Midway through law school, students take Writing & Representation: Advocacy (Advocacy), a three-credit, one-semester, graded course. Full-time faculty members with status identical to other full-time faculty members coordinate both W&R courses, and both entail some large-group class meetings taught by the coordinators and reference librarians. Most of the teaching occurs in small classes taught by adjunct professors, who are highly experienced lawyers and judges carefully selected from the rich pool of legal talent in the Twin Cities area, trained, and supervised by the WRAP and Advocacy coordinators. For example, WRAP professors attend three seminars on teaching and gather with the coordinators for up to a half hour before each class.

Each twelve-person WRAP homeroom has both a writing professor, with a minimum of three years of post-J.D. experience, and a representation professor, with a minimum of five years of post-J.D. experience. Each week, students meet for two hours with the writing professor or the representation professor. The writing professor teaches research, analysis, and writing of office memos, advice letters, contract clauses, and motion practice memoranda and meets one-on-one with each student at least twice. For every scored paper, there are preliminary projects, e.g., research notes and outlines. Students write multiple drafts of one of the office memos and the motion practice memorandum. The representation professor conducts workshops in client interviewing, counseling, and negotiation; he or she also evaluates exercises in client interviewing and counseling, contract negotiation, mediated negotiation, and motion practice oral argument as well as the papers prepared for these exercise, e.g., a counseling outline and a pre-mediation submission. WRAP students also take a research and citation test.

Each twelve-person Advocacy writing group has an appellate professor who teaches and evaluates research, analysis, and writing of an appellate brief. Numerous trial skills professors conduct and evaluate exercises in deposing a witness, examining a witness, cross-examination, and making a closing argument. The course concludes with an appellate oral argument before the appellate professor and two trial skills professors, acting as a three-judge panel, and a full bench trial before a trial skills professor acting as judge. Several of the trial exercises are videotaped and reviewed by a second trial skills professor.

In both courses, students communicate regularly with coordinators and adjunct professors through office visits, phone calls, and e-mail. Furthermore, both WRAP and Advocacy students have access to writing tutors for half-hour consultations if they feel the need for additional assistance in such areas as organization and citation.


Nearly all of the texts and course materials used in the W&R courses have
been written by William Mitchell faculty members:

* The Process of Legal Research by Christina Kunz, Deborah Schmedemann, Matthew Downs, Ann Bateson, and Susan Catterall (Aspen Law and Business 6th ed. 2004);
* Synthesis: Legal Reading, Reasoning, and Writing by Deborah Schmedemann and Christina Kunz (Aspen Law and Business 2d ed. 2003);
* Lawyering: Practice and Planning by Roger Haydock, Peter Knapp et al. (West Publishing 2d ed. 2003) with accompanying videotapes and manuals;
* Advocacy (four volumes) by Roger Haydock and John Sonsteng (West Publishing 1994).

In addition to completing the Writing & Representation courses, students take least two elective skills credits, from a wide range of simulated and clinical courses, and complete the advanced research and writing requirement, typically through a scholarly paper.

Contact information: Professor and Associate Dean Deborah Schmedemann at dschmedemann@wmitchell.edu and Professor Ken Kirwin at kkirwin@wmitchell.edu.

University of Illinois College of Law

At the University of Illinois College of Law, first-year students take Legal Research & Writing (2 credits) during the Fall semester and Introduction to Advocacy (3 credits) during the Spring semester. Students receive either High Honors, Honors, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory in each course. In Legal Research & Writing, students learn to conduct legal research in both print and on-line sources. They also learn to analyze cases, statutes and other legal sources, and to apply their knowledge to factual scenarios. Students complete a number of small research and writing exercises, two drafts of a closed office memorandum and two drafts of an open office memorandum. Students gather the facts for the open office memorandum by interviewing a mock client. In Introduction to Advocacy, students continue to learn to conduct legal research and to draft persuasive documents. They draft a pre-trial memorandum and an appellate brief. They also conduct a mock negotiation, and trial and appellate oral arguments. The Legal Research & Writing faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law consists of six professors: the Director of Legal Research & Writing; the Associate Director of Legal Research & Writing; and four full-time professors. Please contact Shannon Moritz, Director of Legal Research & Writing, for additional information.

American University, Washington College of Law

Curriculum:
-Two semester, four credit course
-Legal research, analysis, and writing
-Four major writing assignments, both predictive and persuasive
-Several smaller assignments including a plain language translation, an academic court-observation piece, and oral advocacy
-Conferencing during the drafting process with instructor and with teaching assistant
-Collaborative team assignments (both research and writing) throughout the semester
-Two collaborative partner assignments

Faculty/Status:
-Mixed full-time and adjunct program
-Director (tenured), Associate Director and Academic Coordinator (long-term contracts) and two full-time instructors (long-term contracts)
-About 50% taught by full-time, in approximately 1:22 ratio
-About 50% taught by adjuncts, in approximately 1:11 ratio
-Some adjuncts have taught for over ten years, and the last three full-time hires were former adjuncts in the program
-Other courses taught by full-time faculty: Criminal Law, Employment Law, Advanced Lawyering
-Full-time faculty are members of (and have chaired) faculty committees
-Summer research stipends and research assistants granted to all full-time faculty
-Recent publications include: Penelope Pether, Inequitable Injunctions: The Scandal of Private Judging in the U.S. Courts, 56 Stanford Law Review 1435 (2004), and Nancy Modesitt, Whistleblowing: The Law of Retaliatory Discharge (2d ed. 2004)(co-authored with Daniel P. Westaman).

Contact:
mjanderson@wcl.american.edu

Website:
http://wcl.american.edu/legalrhetoric/

Thomas Cooley Law School

Thomas Cooley Law School was the first law school to put all its full-time writing teachers on tenure track and keep them there. That happened in 1984, and we now have eight professors on tenure or tenure track. All the professors have had practice experience.

We require six credit hours of legal research and writing for all students and three additional hours for most students.

Research & Writing is taught in the first year. Students write five papers, including three office memorandums. Students meet with the professor several times to review their work. They also do in-class and out-of-class writing exercises throughout the term. We were the first school (we believe) to teach research through audiotapes that students use at the library. There is a series of nine tapes that describe the process of legal research and walk students through an actual problem using that process. Students also receive six hours of training in computer research. We give a graded test on research and on punctuation.

In their second year, students in seven of our eight concentrations take Law Practice. Our Moot Court course is also required for students who choose the Litigation concentration.

In Law Practice, students learn civil-pretrial practice skills. Students write a litigation plan, a retainer agreement, a memorandum of law, a complaint, an answer, interrogatories, requests to produce documents, requests to admit, and various letters to the client. The class culminates in writing a summary-disposition motion and brief and arguing that motion before one of Michigan’s sitting judges. The Law Practice faculty consists of active Michigan lawyers. Students meet with the professor for critique on a draft of the summary-disposition motion and brief.

In Moot Court, our students write an appellate brief and argue before the mock United States Supreme Court. Our Moot Court faculty members are appellate lawyers and former appellate judges.

In their third year, students take Advanced Research & Writing. In the first half of the course, students write an opinion letter, a persuasive statement of facts (from the other side’s point of view), and an appellate brief. They also work on a set of writing exercises. Once again, the research is taught mainly through audiotapes, students receive six hours of computer-research training, and they take a graded research test. In the second half of the class, students are taught legal drafting. After a series of shorter drafting assignments, they draft a municipal ordinance and a contract. We also give a graded three-hour drafting exercise at the end of the term.

Of course, in each of these courses we stress coherent organization, a clear, plain writing style, and proper mechanics and citation form.

South Texas College of Law

Contrary to the programmatic data submitted by other schools, we believe that objective data suggests that our LRW program is one of the best in the country. Our students, after completing our rigorous LRW program, have won 87 national moot court and advocacy competitions (twice as many as any other school). These victories prove the quality of the instruction in written and oral advocacy received by our students in their LRW classes. This success is the direct result of the quality of our LRW professors and program, the support received from our non-LRW faculty and administration (including the recent elimination of all distinctions between doctrinal and LRW faculty by granting tenure-track status to LRW faculty), and the hard work of our students. Assuming that the goal of an LRW program is to produce students who can "think, write, and advocate like lawyers," we believe that the incredible success of our students in written and oral advocacy competitions proves that our LRW program is one of the nation’s best.

If you want any further information, please do not hesitate to contact either Professor Tracy McGaugh (713-646-1860, tmcgaugh@stcl.edu ) or Professor Andrew T. Solomon (713-646-2905, asolomon@stcl.edu ).

Albany Law School

Albany Law School was one of the first few law schools to offer legal research and writing integrated with professional skills and ethics in its Introduction to Lawyering course. This first-year required course is followed by a Professional Skills requirement that exposures students to drafting, written or oral persuasion, fact investigation, and alternative dispute resolution. To learn fulfill this requirement, students take advanced Lawyering courses such as Transactional Drafting, Drafting Legislation, Client Interviewing & Counseling, and Appellate Advocacy. All are taught by our Lawyering Professors. Additionally, students have an upper-level writing requirement that may be fulfilled with our Advanced Writing course in scholarly writing. Our writing courses are complimented by a newly created Writing Center.

The first-year required course integrates theory, practice, and professional responsibility within the context of a year-long client-representation problem. Students are placed into mini-firms and begin their representation. Through simulations, discussions, questions and answers, written work, and hands-on experience, students are introduced to client interviewing, legal research, legal reasoning, case planning, client counseling, legal writing, alternative dispute resolution, and oral advocacy.

The full-year course carries a total of four credits with two credits per semester. During the first semester, students are introduced to case analysis, client interviewing, legal research, and objective legal writing. In addition to completing several research paths, many short writing assignments, and citation exercises, students write a memo to the file and write and re-write one closed universe memo. During the second semester, students apply what they have already learned in legal research, receive advanced training in on-line research, and are introduced to client counseling, case planning, alternative dispute resolution, and written and oral advocacy. Students draft pleadings and some draft discovery documents. They also complete a written analysis exercise, prepare for negotiations and write a negotiations summary memo, write a trial level motion brief, and write and argue a two-issue, complex appellate level brief. Students then present oral argument before lawyering faculty as well as Albany area attorneys and judges. Professional responsibility issues are interwoven in the successive scenarios developed throughout the year.

Our lawyering classes are small, ranging from 18-22 students. Students participate in class discussions, in collaborative groups, work individually, and meet with the professor and with the student teaching assistant. Students receive peer critique. They also receive extensive oral comments in workshops and conferences, and they receive extensive written comments on their work, including their ungraded drafts.

Lawyering Professors are on long-term contracts that comply with ABA Standard 405 ( c); they vote on all matters except hiring and awarding tenure to tenure track faculty and serve on all faculty committees. Their salary is highly competitive.

Each of our professors has either taught or practiced law extensively before coming to Albany Law School. We have between us over 55 years of teaching experience. Our professors have produced scholarship about legal writing, learning and teaching theory, as well as on doctrinal subjects. We have given presentations at national conferences of the AALS, ALWD, and LWI, and given many presentations to state and local bar associations or other organizations and in CLE programs on legal research, legal writing, and professional skills. We have served on committees for ALWD, LWI, and the ABA/AALS. We have also served on boards of state and local bar associations and journals. Each Lawyering Professor may, and several do, teach additional courses. Our faculty include Pam Armstrong, Ann Horowitz, Deborah Mann, Joan Leary Matthews, Elaine Mills, Alicia Ouellette, and Jenean Taranto.

Contact person for further information about the program:
Prof. Pam Armstrong
Albany Law School
(518) 445-2364
parms@mail.als.edu

Northern Illinois University College of Law

The Northern Illinois University College of Law requires its first-year students to successfully complete two, two-credit semesters of legal writing, Legal Writing and Advocacy I and II. The NIU-COL legal writing program strives to teach its writing students to analyze facts, frame legal issues and synthesize diverse sources of law to arrive at simple or complex rules and to draft and revise their legal analyses using solid organizational techniques and making rule, analogy and policy arguments. During the first semester, students focus on objective writing, completing two closed-universe memo assignments, one open-research memo assignment and a final examination modeled after the Multistate Performance Test. The two closed-universe memo assignments are rewritten. In this first semester, students are also introduced to lawyering skills such as interviewing, counseling, and client-letter writing. During the second semester, students focus on advocacy. Assignments include drafting and arguing a motion and researching, writing, and rewriting an appellate brief. The semester concludes with two rounds of oral arguments, one practice round and a final graded round in front of local attorneys and judges. Throughout the year, students are encouraged to consider their assignments in the context of the rules of professional responsibility. In addition to the legal writing course, students are required to complete two, one-credit semesters of Legal Research. The legal research classes are taught by the college of law reference librarians, all of whom have law degrees. The legal writing instructors and the librarians work together to coordinate research and writing assignments.

NIU-COL employs three full-time, professional legal writing instructors in a directorless program. The instructors coordinate due dates but are individually responsible for designing their course content. Each instructor teaches between 35-40 first-year students each semester. The small class size allows for significant time for individual student conferences and feedback. As a result, the writing instructors, as the coordinators of the Academic Support Program, have a unique opportunity to work closely with the ASP students to ensure their ultimate success in law school. This commitment to success begins with the NIU-COL legal writing instructors’ administration of a week-long academic orientation for first-year students. It continues with the school’s summer bar skills review seminar, emphasizing essay writing and success on the MPT, and also administered by the legal writing instructors. In addition to teaching responsibilities, each instructor also serves on two faculty committees.

For more information about the NIU-COL writing program contact:
Jeanna L. Hunter at jeannh@niu.edu
Elsa M. Miller at elsamiller@niu.edu
Meredith A. Geller at mgeller@niu.edu

University of Iowa School of Law

For over 30 years, legal writing and research have been taught at Iowa as part of content area courses in our first-year “small section program.” First year students have a small section each semester, in one of the first-year curricular areas (typically contracts or criminal law first semester, and contracts, property, or constitutional law second semester). These classes are taught by tenured or tenure-track doctrinal faculty, who design the various assignments (memos, legal briefs, client letters) to reflect issues central to that particular course. In this way, the writing assignments become a means for students to learn the content area of the course.

While ours is a “directorless” program, the small section faculty work within common guidelines to ensure that all students have opportunity to (1) write case and statutory memos, trial or appellate briefs; (2) revise at least one of these documents each semester; (3) receive extensive written responses to each document they submit; (4) meet in individual conference at least twice a semester to go over their writing with the faculty member teaching the course; (5) receive instruction in legal research (including computer assisted research) both semesters, with assistance from the library staff.

In addition to the 4 writing credits they receive through the small section program, students are required to complete 5 writing credits across their 2nd and 3rd years—through Appellate Advocacy/Moot Court; courses (including seminars, externships, and clinic); and independent research and writing projects with direct and on-going faculty supervision. For supplemental writing instruction at any point, students (as well as faculty and staff) also have access to one-on-one help in the Writing Resource Center. (We believe the Center, established in 1989, was the first in the country to be housed in a law school, exclusively for the law school community.) Staff members in this professional and peer tutoring center include several lawyers with present or past affiliation with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

For more information, please contact Nancy Jones, Director, Writing Resource Center,
at nancy-lyn-jones@uiowa.edu.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW

The legal research and writing program (Law Firm) at Syracuse University College of Law is a two-semester, two credit program. Students are graded on the work they produce for this course.

The director of the program is an Associate Professor of Law and is on the school’s tenure track. The other seven Law Firm instructors have uncapped contracts. For more information on Syracuse’s Law Firm instructors, please visit the school’s website at
http://www.law.syr.edu/faculty/index.asp . All Law Firm teachers share in creating the writing and research problems used by the students.

Law Firm classes are taught in small sections of approximately twenty students, and all classes are supported by Teaching Assistants who meet regularly with the first year students. In addition, the program is supported by a writing specialist who holds weekly office hours and conducts workshops on a variety of topics relevant to legal writing.

The Law Firm program introduces students to the core lawyering skills of writing, research, oral advocacy, and client interviewing. In the first semester, most students are introduced to the analytical structure of legal argument. They complete two principal writing assignments in the form of predictive memoranda and also complete a variety of shorter exercises. These students also conduct a short client interview and are introduced to library-based legal research. In the second semester, most students learn how to conduct computerized legal research and are introduced to persuasive legal writing concepts. These students again complete two writing assignments, including an appellate brief, and then argue the issues contained in that brief in a moot court setting.

Within its Law Firm program, Syracuse also includes two sections devoted to the study of international legal research and writing. These two sections cover the same fundamental areas as the other Law Firm sections, but students, who are selected for this section in the summer before they arrive in law school, also spend part of the spring semester working on a "memorial" and oral argument to the International Court of Justice. Approximately one-third of the class is then selected for a moot court team that competes in Toronto each March.

For more information about the Law Firm program at Syracuse University College of Law, please contact Professor Ian Gallacher, Director, Legal Research and Writing, at igallach@law.syr.edu.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO SCHOOL OF LAW

The University of Colorado School of Law provides a strong legal writing experience, in which students do extensive writing and rewriting under the direction of excellent faculty who provide comprehensive feedback and extensive one-on-one guidance. First-year students take two credit hours of Legal Writing during the fall semester, and two credit hours of Appellate Court Advocacy during the spring semester. Each course is graded, and meets twice each week. The student/faculty ratio is about 1/40, with each faculty member teaching two sections of about twenty students each. Legal Writing teaches predictive analysis and writing. In addition to other, shorter assignments, students prepare at least one closed-universe memorandum and one open-universe research memorandum, each of which is substantially rewritten after the professor provides extensive feedback and meets with each student. Appellate Court Advocacy teaches persuasive analysis and writing. Students work on a single problem for the semester, and prepare a trial court brief and an appellate brief, which is an extended rewrite of the trial brief. The spring semester closes with each student performing an appellate oral argument before a panel consisting of the professor and two practitioners. Research teaching is integrated into the course each semester, and is taught by law library faculty members, each of whom holds both juris doctor and library degrees. The legal writing faculty provides ample individual guidance for each student, with mandatory and optional conferences during both the fall and spring semesters. We make the most of our four-credit-hour requirement, and our students realize fine progress during the year. After the first year, students must take a seminar that requires a scholarly paper, and may take upper-level writing courses and clinics. Upper-level doctrinal courses may also require writing projects at the option of the professor.

The legal writing program is co-directed by legal writing professionals, employed on renewable three-year contracts. The co-directors set the curriculum’s essential content, but the program is collaborative, and each professor has substantial freedom to teach his or her course. Including the co-directors, there are four legal writing faculty members, each of whom teaches full time, and holds the title “Legal Writing Professor.” Each is hired initially on a one-year contract, and, if reappointed, then continues on a three-year contract that is indefinitely renewable. The co-directors share one vote in faculty meetings on all matters except hiring, promotion, and tenure. All legal writing professors serve and vote on faculty committees. And each receives faculty development funds, research assistants, and is eligible for research stipends just like tenure-track faculty. If they desire, legal writing professors can also design and teach courses and seminars outside the legal writing curriculum, for which they receive extra compensation.

For additional information, please contact Todd M. Stafford, Co-Director, Legal Writing Program, at todd.stafford@colorado.edu.

Wake Forest University School of Law

What makes the Legal Research and Writing (“LRW”) Program at Wake Forest University School of Law strong? Our experienced faculty, small classes, demanding curriculum, and extensive orientation program. The eight full-time members of the LRW faculty have diverse and significant legal experience from the courtroom to the boardroom, and a range of academic and practical experience. The faculty members are able to provide students with significant one-on-one attention because of the 20-1 student/faculty ratio.

The LRW program at Wake Forest consists of a week long LRW-orientation (“LRW Week”) program and three required semesters of formal instruction. During LRW Week, the students receive 14 hours of LRW classroom instruction ranging from basic civics to legal analysis and how to draft a memorandum of law. During the first semester, which focuses on basic legal objective memoranda, the students are required to submit three major legal memoranda, plus one re-write. In addition, during the first semester, students have two individual conferences with their professor and generally two individual conferences with student teaching assistants. During the second semester, the students focus on statutory interpretation and persuasive writing. The students submit one complex statutory memorandum, one trial brief, and engage in a motion hearing. The students also have an opportunity for an individual conference with their professor during the second semester. During the third semester, most students write a complex federal statutory appellate brief, and engage in an oral argument. Wake Forest has started, however, an alternative third semester program where students write a pro bono appellate brief for the state guardian ad litem program. The students’ brief is submitted to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

For further information, please contact Chris Nero Coughlin at coughlcn@law.wfu.edu

Arizona State University College of Law

Arizona State University’s Writing Program benefits from both a strong writing faculty and a solid curriculum. In terms of faculty:

· The faculty are eligible for full job protection beyond 405(c)(3) status and consists of seven academic professional full-time legal writing professors, including:
o a director who has been awarded this tenure equivalent (currently on sabbatical for the academic year) who has been at ASU 7 years,
o four other faculty, all on track, who have been at ASU 3-4 years, and
o two visitors (one to cover the sabbatical and one to cover an unexpectedly large class; visitors are not yet on track)
· All writing professors (other than visitors) serve on and/or chair committees and vote on all matters other than hiring and promotion of doctrinal faculty
· All writing professors have substantial law practice experience
· All writing professors have publications, many on legal writing topics; most present at conferences; ASU hosted a regional legal writing conference in 2002; writing professors also serve on national legal writing boards
· Writing faculty are eligible for sabbaticals, summer teaching, research grants, and research assistants on the same basis as doctrinal faculty
· Student teacher ratios average between 35:1 and 40:1, with classroom ratios of 20:1 or less in the first semester

In terms of curriculum:

· ASU’s program requires two semesters, which include:
o Print and computer-assisted research
o objective memos and letters
o persuasive writing
o oral arguments (with the final arguments judged by all five sitting Arizona Supreme Court Justices, at the Supreme Court, last year)
o mandatory conferences
o rewrites on all major assignments
· All required program components and upper-level elective writing courses are taught by full-time writing faculty
· Upper-level offerings include Legal Drafting, Intensive Legal Research and Writing, Advanced Legal Research (taught each semester by the law library’s director and associate director), Advanced Legal Writing, and Appellate Advocacy

For more information, please contact the program’s director, Judy Stinson, at judith.stinson@asu.edu or Kirsten Davis, the Acting Director, at kirsten.davis@asu.edu

FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW

Legal Skills & Values at FIU is a required three-semester pre-clinical program, aimed at giving students a comprehensive, integrated foundation in the communications skills on which good lawyering is based. Students receive three credits for the first semester, two for the second, and three for the third.

The first two semesters focus on introducing students to – and helping students to achieve competency in -- the standard legal research, analysis and writing curriculum. In addition to various short writing projects (such as judicial opinions, client letters, and planning, self-assessment and reflective memos), students write an office memo in the first semester, and engage in written and oral appellate advocacy in the second semester. In both semesters, these tasks are presented in the context of a simulation, so students do them as part of representing a (make-believe) client. The students do their work in role. In first semester, they get the facts for their memo by interviewing the client; in second semester, the follow up their oral argument by counseling the client. Professional responsibility is also a key part of the LS&V curriculum, and it, too, is taught with the students in role, contemplating ethical issues raised by their representation of their clients. Because a focus on international and comparative law is part of the mission of FIU, at least one of the simulations that the students do in their first year involves an international issue.

At the moment, the third semester course focuses on pre-trial practice. Students research and write an office memo, which forms the basis for doing a complaint or answer, a motion and memorandum of law, and a negotiation for their client. Students conclude the negotiation by drafting a settlement agreement. This is only the third year of FIU’s existence. We plan, in future years, to add a variety of third-semester options, in addition to the pre-trial course.

Individual feedback conferences with students on all their major pieces of writing are mandatory. There are also many opportunities for group feedback. Major exercises – oral arguments, client interviews, negotiations – are taped, and available on http://lawstream.fiu.edu for individual and group viewing.

The LS&V course is the spring board for an active and successful Board of Advocates program, which is now in its second year. The program was developed and is coached by one of the LS&V instructors. In the first year of the program, students finished second in one national moot court competition and won best brief in another.

The director of the LS&V program is a tenured full professor. As of now, the four other LS&V faculty members have lecturer status. All are currently on one-year contracts and are eligible to apply for three-year contracts. There is no upper limit on the number of such successive contracts that an LS&V lecturer may have. LS&V faculty may vote in faculty meetings on all topics except hiring, promotion and tenure of tenure track faculty. The faculty/student ratio is approximately 1/35. LS&V faculty with other duties – such as directing the program, advising the moot court program, and teaching in the academic support program – have smaller student loads.· Summer research grants and summer teaching are available. Additional information about the Legal Skills & Values program and faculty is available at http://law.fiu.edu.

Contact person: Jean Zorn, Director, Legal Skills & Values Program, zornj@fiu.edu.

Stanford Law School

At Stanford Law School Legal Research and Writing is a four-unit course taught in the first year of law school. The course is given two units of credit per semester. In the fall class meets twice a week for 70 minutes each. In the spring class meets twice a week, once for 90 minutes and once for the research component for 60 minutes. Each LRW lecturer is assigned one small section of less than 30 students. The focus of the fall semester is primarily on developing objective, analytical thinking and writing skills, as well as teaching legal research. The course is taught as a simulation. Our students meet our "client" in a videotaped interview on the first day of class during orientation. Over the course of the semester, the students have three major writing assignments that arise out of the legal issues presented in the client interview. The facts for each memo assignment are derived from the interviews with our client and other witnesses, and documents provided by the client and witnesses. Legal research is integrated into the LRW course. Each lecturer is paired with a librarian instructor, and the research assignments arise out of the primary client simulation. Other major goals of the program are to teach students how to collaborate with each other, to model professional standards of client involvement, to help students understand the procedural context of a lawyer's research and writing, and to develop professional standards of timeliness and courtesy.

Legal Research and Writing lecturers are required to have at least 2 years of law practice experience. Our current LRW faculty of 6 lecturers have 17 years, 15 years, 7 years, 6 years (2), and 2 years of experience since graduating from law school. Lecturers are not tenured nor are on the tenure-track. Lecturers may take coursework in furtherance of an advanced degree (J.S.M.) without paying tuition. Lecturers meet every week to discuss lesson plans and plan curricula.

For more information, contact:
Jeanne Merino
Director, 1L Legal Research and Writing
Stanford Law School(650) 725-8526
jmerino@law.stanford.edu

Boston University School of Law

The First Year Writing Program at Boston University School of Law is a two‑semester, two‑credit graded seminar covering both legal writing and research. The Program Director is a non-tenure track faculty member and has full voting rights at faculty meetings, with the exception of tenure recommendations. In addition, the Director serves as a full voting member of faculty committees. The Instructors are all attorneys with at least two years work experience. For more detailed profiles of the Instructors, please consult http://www.bu.edu/law/jd/writing/instructors.html. Many of the Instructors have taught in the Program for over ten years and turnover averages less that 25 percent annually. Each Instructor works with a Teaching Assistant, a second or third year law student who the Director selects from a pool of applicants. For more on the Teaching Assistant Program, please consult http://www.bu.edu/law/jd/writing/assistants.html. Teaching Assistants receives two credits per semester and attend both the seminar to which he or she is assigned, as well as a biweekly class taught by the Director. The Instructors, however, remain responsible for grading student papers.

The Director designs the basic curriculum for the Program. Its primary emphasis is on writing and on teaching students the importance of language as the tool for lawyers. The Director also supplies many of the teaching materials and conducts two training workshops for the Instructors and Teaching Assistants: a two evening workshop in the summer, and a one evening workshop in the fall. Classes are conducted in small groups of 13 or 14 students. In the first semester, the students receive instruction in legal research, both manually and on-line. In the first semester, students generally receive weekly assignments, including editing exercises, research finding exercises and office memoranda. For examples of these assignments, please consult http://www.bu.edu/law/jd/writing/assignments.htm. In the second semester, students prepare a moot court appellate brief and oral argument, an agreement, a complaint, a client letter and a trial brief. For most assignments, the students prepare two drafts of their papers. The Instructors and the Director share the responsibility for developing these assignments.

For additional information, contact Professor Robert Volk, Director, First Year Research and Writing Program, at rvolk@bu.edu.

UNLV

Curriculum:
· three semesters, 9 graded credits, 3 hours/week, full semester
· first two semesters: standard predictive/persuasive, research in both semesters
· third semester: students choose from menu of various courses in one of four areas: advanced advocacy, drafting, advanced legal writing, and judicial writing. Courses may address a variety of doctrinal areas, and use a variety of techniques. Ex: Family Law Drafting; Simulation Trial Level Advocacy. Some students do required remedial work in semester three.
· successive drafts of major assignments, mandatory conferences
· numerous smaller assignments: Ex: client letters, settlement agreement, court watching, reflective papers, peer and self edits
· reports to senior partner, oral argument
· intro to interviewing, counseling and negotiation
· 5-6 class hours on professionalism
· collaborative “firms” on some assignments

Status of Legal Writing Faculty: full time (occasionally use of casebook faculty or outstanding adjunct in third semester)
· possibility of three year contracts
· faculty/student ratio: 1 semester 1/38; 1 semester 1/23 plus non-LRW course
· salary at or above national average
· voting rights (except on tenure matters)
· chair and member of committees both in law school and university
· integrated offices and professor title
· all LRW profs have opportunity teach other “casebook” courses
· faculty has the opportunity to design upper division courses that suit their interests
· summer research grants and summer teaching available at same pay scale as casebook faculty
· some LRW faculty publish both in and out of LRW area

Contact person& email: Terry Pollman pollman@ccmail.nevada.edu

University of Texas

Legal Research & Legal Writing is a graded, year-long course. We control our own courses but work together to promote consistency. We use student TAs in the course, and we select them based on academics and writing ability; they must take an advanced-writing course to prepare for the job.

Our strengths are our faculty and some recent changes that improved our program. Our faculty: Those who teach the required course have a combined 30 years of teaching experience, and all graduated from top-15 law schools. They include a former law-firm partner, a former federal judicial clerk, two holders of graduate degrees in other fields, and the author of a book and two dozen articles on legal writing. Recent changes: We now have long-term contracts. The required course is now graded. And reliance on student TAs has been reduced. Since we’ve been freed from that supervisory work, we now offer more electives, including courses on brief writing, transactional drafting, and litigation writing, plus a seminar on legal writing.

Michigan State University College of Law

First-year law students are required to take Research, Writing & Advocacy I in the fall and RWA II in the spring, each worth two credits. In the fall, students learn about objective legal analysis, the forms of the office memorandum and the client advice letter, book research, and citation form. In addition to their RWA I class but as a component of RWA I, students attend, one hour per week, a Writing Skills Workshop taught by graduate English students. In the Workshop, students review basic principles of good writing, hone their editing skills, and do assignments related to RWA I. In the spring in RWA II, students learn about persuasion: they write a trial brief and an appellate brief, and they practice oral advocacy skills through practice oral arguments before their RWA professor and graded arguments before outside attorneys invited for the exercise. In the spring, students also focus on research using online services, draft a complaint, and complete their introduction to citation form and use. During the course of RWA I and II, students are also introduced to client interviewing and reporting orally to a supervising attorney.

The RWA faculty consists of six full-time clinical professors (including the director), who teach about two-thirds of the sections, and four to six adjuncts per semester, who teach the other one-third of the RWA classes. Each RWA class consists of 22 to 25 students and meets once per week for 100 minutes. A full-time teaching load is two RWA sections, meaning that a full-time RWA clinical professor has from 45 to 50 students per semester. (During the 2003-04, however, classes were overfull, such that a full-time load included as many as 56 students.) For each section taught, a RWA clinical professor reads from each student in the fall a case brief, a short IRAC analysis, a full memorandum of eight pages, a rewrite of that memorandum, two to three short research exercises, a client letter based on one of those research exercises, and an open research memorandum of ten to fourteen pages. In the spring, reviewed work includes a complaint, a trial brief of about ten pages, and an appellate brief of twenty pages, as well as shorter weekly writing assignments that are drafts of certain parts of the two major writing assignments. RWA professors hold one mandatory conference in the fall with each student and an individual practice oral argument session in the spring. Beyond their teaching duties for their individual classes, full-time RWA professors share responsibility for developing those assignments, exercises, and quizzes that are program-wide and for creating individual assignments for the use of adjuncts. In the 2003-04 year, RWA faculty were allowed to attend faculty meetings, and their title was changed from instructor to Assistant Clinical Professor, although they are not currently allowed to vote in faculty meetings or to serve on committees. Promotion and retention standards are being drafted this year to provide RWA faculty with long-term contracts or continuous appointment status.

Contact person: Sharon Pocock
sharon.pocock@law.msu.edu
Web Page: < http://www.law.msu.edu/rwa/ >. To learn more about the background and accomplishments of the full-time RWA faculty (Nancy Costello, William Fleener, Deanne Andrews Lawrence, Daphne O’Regan, Sharon Pocock, and Sungjean Seo), please go to http://www.law.msu.edu/faculty_staff/profiles.phpand look under Faculty Profiles.

CAPITAL UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL

Capital University Law School, located in Columbus, Ohio, prides itself on its emphasis on comprehensive skills instruction. In the legal writing context, Capital students complete a required first year course in Legal Research and Writing, write at least one lengthy seminar paper or brief to fulfill the upper class writing requirement, and complete a cap stone Legal Drafting course during the final year of law study. The required first-year course in Legal Research and Writing provides students with an integrated approach to developing the essential skills of legal research, legal analysis, and legal writing. Students earn four credit hours over the year long course and are taught in small sections of approximately thirty students. Students develop research and analysis skills in the context of writing both predictive and persuasive documents. The upper class writing requirement provides students with the opportunity to delve deeply into a legal topic and to develop the analytical skills necessary to write a lengthy document. In the Legal Drafting course, students hone their writing skills by writing a document, either in class or out, every week of the semester. The Legal Drafting course gives students the skills to successfully write a variety of legal documents that are typically encountered in the profession. With its location in an urban area with a large legal community, the law school has been successful in attracting quality legal writing and legal drafting instructors who have excellent academic credentials and varied practice experiences.

For further information, contact Janet George Blocher at jblocher@law.capital.edu

Villanova University School of Law

We are extremely proud of our Legal Writing Program at Villanova, in which courses are taught by seven full-time Legal Writing Professors with uncapped, renewable contracts. During the first year, students are enrolled in a year-long Legal Analysis, Writing, & Oral Advocacy course that currently awards two credits at the end of the first year. Each section has approximately 20 students. Legal research is taught separately by law librarians with at J.D. and library degrees. Each Legal Writing Professor teaches two sections, with the exception of the Assistant Dean for Legal Writing, who teaches one section. In the fall term, students prepare increasingly complex closed and then open research legal memoranda. During the spring term, students brief and argue an appellate problem, usually based on a traditional domestic law topic of the professors’ choosing. Second semester students may alternatively opt to enroll in International Advocacy, in which they learn to research international law, and then brief and argue a case before a moot International Court of Justice. This course is now in its twelfth year. After the first year, students must complete an upper level practical writing/skills course and a seminar course or directed research that requires a scholarly paper, and may enroll in other writing-intensive courses such as Advanced Legal Writing and Advanced Appellate Advocacy. Villanova also offers a variety of upper level writing experiences including moot court, three law journals, and a broad selection of seminar and skills courses.

Our Legal Writing Faculty members are hired with one-year contracts, which are renewable annually for the second and third years. Thereafter, the professors are offered renewable three-year contracts. The program is administered by the Assistant Dean for Legal Writing, who has an uncapped term and votes on all matters except for hiring, retention and promotion of tenure-track faculty. Lou Sirico, the Director of Legal Writing, a member of the tenured faculty, teaches Advanced Legal Writing and a variety of writing seminars for the law school and university community. In addition, Lou is the co-author, with Nancy Schultz, of a major legal writing text, Legal Writing & Other Lawyering Skills (LexisNexis 4th ed. 2004). Our Legal Writing Professors regularly present at regional and national Legal Writing Institute and ALWD Conferences, and are known for their work developing legal skills programs for international students and lawyers. In addition, our faculty members have developed and taught courses in Advanced Appellate Advocacy and Legal Analysis & Writing for undergraduates at Villanova and Lincoln Universities, as well as other courses in Villanova’s summer program in Montréal. Our faculty members serve on the boards of national legal writing organizations and publications, and regularly publish in the field of legal writing and other areas of the law.

For more information, contact Diane Edelman, Assistant Dean for Legal Writing, at edelman@law.villanova.edu.

A publication about our Legal Writing Program and Faculty can be found at http://www.law.villanova.edu/generalpublic/publicrelations/docs/ffgolw.pdf , and more extensive profiles are located at http://www.law.villanova.edu/facultyandstaff/facultyprofiles/facultyprofiles.asp . (click on Legal Writing Faculty).

Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, University of Louisville

In recognition that legal writing and research are very important skills, the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville devotes four hours of the first year curriculum to legal writing and research instruction. Basic Legal Skills (BLS), a three-hour course, focuses on preparation of legal memos in the fall and brief writing and oral advocacy in a moot court program in the spring. Three full-time faculty members with over 46 years of experience teach the course; each is autonomous in designing and teaching her own class. Legal Research is a separate one-hour course taught by the law librarians. Brandeis also requires an upper-division writing requirement and offers upper-level writing electives including drafting and advanced appellate advocacy. Students and legal writing faculty interact often and students receive feedback through office conferences, interactive in-class writing assignments, and memo and brief assignments.

The student-faculty ratio in recent years for BLS has ranged from 45 to 48 students per faculty member. Currently the BLS faculty members, with the exception of one tenured professor, are on three-year contracts. Contract professors have all of the same rights as other faculty members except for voting on hiring decisions. They are presently not required to publish but may apply for and have received summer research grants. The faculty voted in 2003 to put the BLS spots on the tenure track, but no budget resources have been identified to make this happen.

For more information contact susan.Kosse@louisville.edu ; judith.fischer@louisville.edu; kathybean@louisville.edu.

University of Denver Sturm College of Law

The Lawyering Process Program is a two-semester, four-credit course required of all first-year students. The course is graded with the same distribution requirements as all other 1L courses. Research is integrated into the curriculum in both semesters. The fall semester requires almost weekly assignments including multiple rewrites of an office memorandum of up to fifteen pages. The spring semester includes a client letter but primarily focuses on persuasive writing and allows students to work as a team to create several versions of a brief. In addition, students make oral presentations both semesters: an oral report to a senior partner in the fall semester and an oral argument in the spring. Students meet frequently with the Lawyering Process faculty during office hours and are required to attend at least two sessions with their professor each semester. The Lawyering Process Program integrated the CaseMap case management software program into the course this year and provided all of the course and problem materials to students on CD-ROM.

The Director of the Lawyering Process Program is a tenure track member of the law faculty and teaches one section of Lawyering Process and one other first year required course. There are eight full-time Lawyering Process Professors who teach two sections each and one part-time Lawyering Process Professor who teaches one section. The current enrollment averages fewer than 20 students per section. Lawyering Process Professors hire one upper-level student teaching assistant for each section and one or more practicing attorneys volunteer as Senior Partners for each section. Senior Partners hear oral reports and judge oral arguments, provide some in-class sessions, and hold office hours for advice conferences. The Director and LP Professors meet weekly to discuss the curriculum and teaching methods.

Lawyering Process Professors are eligible for three-year renewable contracts. They participate on faculty committees and have voting rights at the committee level.

For more information, contact klynn@law.du.edu or visit the Lawyering Process Program website at http://www.law.du.edu/lawproc/

The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania University

First-year students at Penn State Dickinson are required to take seven credits of courses involving legal analysis, research, and writing. They take two Legal Analysis & Writing (“LAW”) courses (three credits in the Fall semester and two credits in the Spring semester) and two separately graded legal research courses (one credit each semester). In the Fall semester, the LAW course focuses on objective writing and consists of a series of analytical, writing, and editing exercises, culminating in an open research memorandum. In the Spring semester, the LAW courses include statutory interpretation, persuasive writing, and oral advocacy. This year each LAW section averaged twenty students and each legal research section averaged ten students. The LAW professors schedule mandatory conferences with each student throughout each semester and, in keeping with the student-centered philosophy of Penn State Dickinson, each LAW professor maintains an “open door” policy. In addition, the legal writing program is supported by a writing specialist who has a J.D. degree and an M.A. in English. Students are encouraged to make appointments with the writing specialist to receive additional one-on-one feedback on written assignments. Further, second-year students are required to take an appellate practice course that is taught by a tenured professor. In the appellate practice course, students draft an appellate brief and present an oral argument to a three-member panel of judges – one faculty member and two outside judges.

The LAW courses are taught by five, full-time professors who have six to twenty-five years of practice experience. Most of them have advanced degrees other than the J.D. degree and have clerked for federal judges. The legal research courses are taught by four tenured or tenure-track librarians with J.D. degrees. LAW professors currently have renewable contracts, but the law school’s faculty has voted to consider a tenure-track option for LAW professors. Currently, after three two-year terms, LAW professors are eligible for seven-year renewable contracts and sabbaticals. LAW professors may vote in faculty meetings on all matters except the hiring and promotion of tenure-track professors, and they serve on faculty committees. Although the teaching of Legal Analysis and Writing is their primary responsibility, they may also teach substantive courses and coach moot court teams. As do all members of the faculty, they receive travel/development funds and summer research stipends.

For additional information about the program, please contact Jane Muller-Peterson at jxm636@psu.edu.

Rutgers University School of Law -- Newark

Rutgers-Newark students are required to take two semesters of LRW for a total of three credits. Students attend one 75-minute class with their instructors each week. In the fall, they also attend nine one-hour seminars with third-year teaching associates, who focus on teaching research and citation. In the fall, students write an ungraded discussion section of a closed memo, a graded rewrite of the closed memo into a full memo, a graded research memo on a torts problem, and a graded research memo on a state criminal law problem. They also take a graded quiz on citation form. In the spring, students write an ungraded draft of an outline of a trial brief, a graded trial brief, and a graded appellate brief (students switch sides and write an appeal of the trial court’s opinion on their brief). Instructors provide very detailed comments on all written assignments. Teaching associates also provide detailed written comments on the use of research and citation form on every memo and brief. In April, students practice appellate oral arguments in class with their instructors and/or teaching associates. They then present a graded oral argument before a panel of attorneys.

Five instructors teach two day sections each of 16 to 18 students. The Director also teaches two day sections of 16 to 18 students and one evening section of approximately 35 students. A sixth instructor teaches another evening section of approximately 35 students. Instructors are considered "part-time" by the University, but work a full-time schedule and have faculty offices and administrative support. They are on one-year renewable contracts, but do not receive benefits, research grants, or developmental funds.

Contact: Prof. Ernest Nardone, LRW Director, enardone@kinoy.rutgers.edu

Roger Williams University School of Law

The administration and faculty at Roger Williams University School of Law place great value on teaching students legal research, writing, and lawyering skills. Students at Roger Williams take four required semesters of Legal Methods during their law school career. During their first year, students take Legal Methods I in the fall, in which they learn legal research, predictive legal writing, and analysis through a series of six required assignments, culminating in two drafts of an open-universe office memorandum. During the spring of the first year, students take Legal Methods II, in which they learn persuasive legal writing, trial brief writing, written and oral appellate advocacy, client interviewing, and negotiation skills. The spring semester assignments include a short predictive writing assignment, a trial brief memorandum, and a client letter, culminating in two drafts of an appellate brief and an oral argument before a panel of judges comprised of local attorneys and judges. Students receive extensive written and oral feedback on each assignment and have several opportunities to revise their papers. Moreover, as part of the oral advocacy unit, the Legal Methods faculty has led a trip for 30 first-year students to hear oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court and participate in a private question and answer session with Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In addition to the required first-year course, students must take two more semesters of Legal Methods, choosing from a menu of courses including Legal Drafting, Advanced Legal Writing, Advanced Legal Research, Advanced Appellate Advocacy, ADR, and Client Interviewing and Counseling. All Legal Methods classes are taught in seminar-size classes of 12-15, and total student loads for full-time faculty members are kept small to allow for frequent and extensive individualized feedback.

The first-year Legal Methods classes are taught by seven full-time, long-term contract Professors of Legal Writing, all of whom are committed to the school, the development of the Legal Methods program, and to careers teaching legal writing. Each member of the Legal Methods faculty attends and participates in regional and national legal writing conferences and list discussions, and several regularly present and publish in the area of legal writing pedagogy. Upper-level methods classes are taught by both Legal Writing Professors and tenured, doctrinal faculty members. Professors of Legal Writing are fully integrated into the faculty at Roger Williams. They serve on law school committees, attend faculty meetings, receive book and travel budgets, are eligible for summer research grants and sabbaticals, and teach other courses, including non-methods seminars. In addition, Legal Methods faculty and students at Roger Williams are supported by a full-time writing specialist and a full-time director of academic support. The writing specialist supports the Professors of Legal Writing in the classroom; holds optional group sessions on legal writing topics, such as grammar and sentence-level writing, editing techniques, and implementing the TRRAC format; and meets with students one-on-one to work on their writing.

Contact person for more information on the program:
jelliott@rwu.edu

To access biographies and further information on the Legal Methods faculty members (Cecily Banks, Elizabeth Colt, Jessica Elliott, Lisa McElroy, Jane Rindsberg, Ellen Saideman, and B. Mitchell Simpson) see: http://www.law.rwu.edu

University of Detroit Mercy School of Law

Applied Legal Theory and Analysis (ALTA) is a six-credit course that takes a contextual approach to teaching analysis, writing, and research. The fundamental lawyering skills of communication, research, legal analysis and reasoning, and problem solving are taught by requiring students to systematically apply doctrinal and theoretical concepts to concrete problems in the context of preparing a variety of legal documents (memoranda, client letters, pleadings, contracts, motions, and briefs) and participating in oral presentations (moot court, simulated interviews, and simulated client presentations). Rather than focusing on discrete skills and episodic assignments, ALTA takes a unique approach of beginning with doctrine—most often conceptually difficult material from Contracts—and requiring students to apply that doctrine at increasingly sophisticated levels in the context of preparing a series of documents. There are several pedagogical advantages to this approach. First, it is contextual. Students learn to research and apply the law in the context of resolving legal problems. Second, it allows for an examination and application of theoretical concepts—for example, Hohfeldian and economic analyses—as well as doctrinal concepts. Finally, it addresses a practical pedagogical problem: students do not have the opportunity in the first year to delve deeply into discrete legal concepts. By repeatedly applying conceptually difficult material in various contexts, students learn a basic methodology for acquiring a depth of knowledge. The overarching goal of ALTA, in addition to teaching students how to research, analyze, resolve problems, and communicate their analyses, is to help students become autonomous learners—to be able to take what they have learned in ALTA and apply it to new situations. (More information, albeit a bit dated, is available in Integrating Theory with Practice at University of Detroit Mercy, 77 Mich. B.J. 684 (1998).) The School’s writing across the curriculum program, which was implemented in 1999, requires that every upper-level course include a writing assignment worth at least 15% of the student’s final grade for the course. These assignments are created and evaluated by the faculty teaching those courses.

ALTA is taught by six full-time legal writing faculty with 405(c) status; the Director is on tenure track. The ALTA professors vote at faculty meetings, serve on and chair faculty committees, and otherwise participate in faculty governance. The faculty/student ratio in ALTA is 1-30 or less, which enhances each professor’s ability to provide individual feedback through multiple drafts and student conferences. Careful hiring practices have ensured that the ALTA professors bring a wealth of transactional and litigation experience to the program, including death penalty litigation, health law, corporate governance, juvenile and family law, real estate, public interest, and general litigation.

Contact Person:
Pamela Lysaght
Assistant Professor of Law
Director, Applied Legal Theory and Analysis Program 313.596.0286
lysaghtp@udmercy.edu

University of Southern California

USC’s legal writing program has evolved greatly in the past few years. First-year students in the required course are taught in small sections of approximately 17 students each, ensuring that they get close attention. They are team-taught by an adjunct professor and an upper-level student legal writing fellow. Our adjuncts have included U.S. magistrate judges, Assistant United States Attorneys, law firm partners, in-house counsel, and public interest attorneys. Many of them return year after year to teach the class, gaining valuable experience in the classroom. Our student fellows (who are paid and receive course credit) play an integral role in the classroom, leading exercises and meeting with students in office hours. All of the papers are critiqued and graded solely by the adjunct professors, however. The class is worth two credits each semester and is graded, and the students’ grade counts in their overall GPA.

USC regularly offers advanced Legal Writing and Advocacy classes for upper-level students, in such subjects as contract drafting and appellate advocacy. In addition, USC offers legal writing classes for international LL.M. students, focusing specifically on the special training they need to learn legal writing American-style.

The director of the USC Legal Writing and Advocacy Program is Jean Rosenbluth. She can be reached at jrosenbl@law.usc.edu.

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

The Legal Writing program at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law consists of three mandatory semesters of writing courses in addition to a required upper-level scholarly writing project. (10 credits) The Legal Writing Department is also responsible for conducting a week long (12-16 hour) orientation covering legal process for all first year students in order to prepare students for doing legal analysis in substantive classes.
The Legal Writing Faculty is composed of seven full-time Legal Writing professionals with 5-22 years of legal writing teaching experience. We Legal Writing faculty have 405 (c) status and the ability to earn 5 year renewable contracts. Our scholarship has been placed in top 30 law reviews and over the past several years, the Legal Writing professors have contributed to about 25% of the total scholarship of the faculty. A detailed description or our program follows.

The first year of Legal Writing consists of two graded semesters totaling five graded credits. Credits will be six hours next year. All first year sections are taught by seven full-time Legal Writing professors with an approximate class load of 20-23 students per section. The curriculum of the first semester progresses from the basics of analysis, objective writing, legal research, and citation, to a more advanced mastery of these skills. Legal Writing professors teach all aspects of research and generally have a curriculum consisting of 2-3 major writing assignments in addition to five to ten smaller assignments related to grammar, citation, research or analysis. There are compulsory drafts for, at the very least, the first objective memorandum. A lockstep curriculum is not mandated and some Legal Writing professors often end their semesters with written exams, while others end their semesters with major research projects (and corresponding memoranda).

The second semester generally consists of teaching federal statutory research, administrative research, and advocacy (both written and oral). Most Legal Writing professors assign at least one open universe memo and one or two open universe motions. Some opt to do oral arguments, while others opt to end the year with a mock multistate performance test (MPT). The MPT is now a major component of the Ohio Bar Exam. Appellate Advocacy has been removed from the first year and made one of the electives for fulfilling the mandatory third semester requirement.

The third semester requirement of Legal Writing is a two-credit hour graded requirement that may be fulfilled by students taking one of six-eight electives offered. The offerings include Appellate Brief Writing, Motion Practice, Trial Practice Writing, Litigation, Document Drafting both General and Specific subject matter, and Scholarly Writing. Full-time Legal Writing professors teach at least two of the third semester offerings while adjunct faculty teaches the other sections. From year-to-year, seventy or more students will take Brief Writing. Thus, there are four sections of Brief Writing offered each fall, and one section offered in the spring. Those students completing Brief Writing may opt to compete for the school’s moot court team for one additional credit. Most of the third semester writing courses may be used for students seeking certification for a concentration in advocacy.

The final required writing component in the curriculum is the upper level (scholarly) writing project. This is to be a 40-60 page law review type article that demonstrates “depth of knowledge, research, and thought.” Although this requirement may be fulfilled by way of approved seminar courses, the requirement is generally fulfilled by participation on one of the schools two publications and/or completing an independent project for one to three graded credits. Legal Writing professors either advise or co-advise both of the law school’s publications, and Legal Writing professors ordinarily advise 40% of all upper level writing projects done in the school.

Legal Writing has been a mandatory class at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law for approximately twenty years. There have never been caps on the length of stay for a Legal Writing professor, and two of the original members of the department are still teaching. The average years of “service” of a Legal Writing professor is about twelve and a half years with our “rookies” having five years of seniority. We have three adjuncts teaching third semester classes who have taught Legal Writing courses for approximately fifteen years. Last, but not least, each Legal Writing professor may employ at least one student tutor.

Within the last three years, Legal Writing professors have attained 405 (c) status. We have been officially (and contractually) dubbed “professors” by the faculty, have been offered the opportunity to be awarded long term contracts, and have been given the vote on all issues except tenure. Legal Writing professors have always been voting members on law school committees and have been responsible for ensuring that committee work has actually gotten done. Legal Writing professors serve on all committees except for committees related to whether a professor will be awarded tenure. A Legal Writing professor is currently serving on the Dean’s Search Committee and another on the state mandated Self-Study Committee. Lastly, Legal Writing professors are not forbidden from teaching non-Legal Writing courses if they choose the overload.

If I may be so bold to say so, Legal Writing professors are, in many ways, the very foundation of the law school. Legal Writing professors are responsible for a majority of student organizations and activities including the Law Review, the Journal of Law and Health, and the school’s Moot Court program. Most have played (and continue to play) central roles in the Academic Assistance programs, Bar Prep programs, and community advocacy related programs. In addition, the scholarship of Legal Writing professors of the last five to seven years has amounted to nearly 25% of the total scholarship combined of all current tenured faculty members. Several of our publications have been placed in top 30 law reviews.

The seven full-time professors are on ten month contracts, with the opportunity to teach for compensation in the summer. The Director is not tenured and teaches a virtual full load, if not more. Curriculum and textbooks are neither mandated by the school nor by the Director. Legal Writing professors receive the same research and travel dollars that tenured faculty receive. Finally, although Legal Writing professors are theoretically entitled to sabbaticals, thus far the school has found our collective presence indispensable and has not granted any yet.

UNIVERSITY OF TULSA COLLEGE OF LAW

The first year legal writing program at the University of Tulsa College of Law is a two-semester, six-credit-hour program that integrates legal analysis and legal research into the preparation of objective legal memoranda and trial or appellate court briefs. The legal research component of the course is taught by the College’s professional library staff. The analysis and writing component is taught by tenure track, resident contract, and adjunct faculty. Contract faculty are eligible for renewable contracts of up to five years in length. Adjunct faculty are expected to devote at least twenty hours per week to each section they teach. Full-time faculty attend conferences and other training to enhance their teaching skills, and they fully participate with doctrinal faculty in committee work, attend faculty meetings, and vote on all matters coming before the faculty, except (as to resident contract faculty) tenure decisions. Some of the writing faculty also teach other courses.

The program emphasizes individualized attention to each student, and to that end class size is kept to an average of approximately fifteen students. The faculty provides extensive feedback to students on writing assignments and devotes considerable time to individual conferences with students. The writing faculty have teaching assistants who do not teach classes, but who are available to assist students with assignments and classroom exercises. The College employs Ph.D. English candidates from the University to serve as writing assistants, who work with students on an individual basis on mechanical, organizational, and style aspects of their substantive writing assignments.

All students are taught the same research curriculum, but there is no required or standard writing curriculum. Instead, each writing professor is permitted to choose the textbooks, materials, and assignments best suited to his or her style of teaching. Despite that variety, all faculty share the commitment to developing each student to her or his full potential in the critically important skills of legal analysis and legal writing.

The College’s law library, the Mabee Legal Information Center (MLIC), has 369,000 volumes in almost eight miles of shelving, a study seating capacity of 685, eight professional librarians, and is open 110 hours per week. The $10.4 million, three-story addition to the College of Law, completed in 2000, doubled the floor-space to more than 50,000 and greatly increased the technological options available to students, which options now include 269 network connections on tables and carrels, plus a wireless network throughout the MLIC. The National Jurist recently ranked the MLIC as the 33rd best law school library in the country.

University of New Mexico School of Law

The required program includes two 3 credit classes, one each semester of the first year. The first semester covers: Basic legal reasoning and problem solving; legal research; memo writing; client communications; drafting. The second semester covers: ADR; communication with adversary; writing to the trial court; trial oral argument; appellate advocacy (brief writing and oral argument). In the first semester, in addition to many short assignments, students write and rewrite two closed universe memos and one open research memo. They also write client letters and have a drafting assignment. They complete several library worksheets and citation exercises using ALWD. In the second semester, in addition to shorter assignments, students write a mediation summary, conduct a negotiation, write letters to adversary, write and rewrite a trial level motion brief, argue the motion, write a complex appellate brief and argue it orally. They do not work in teams, but complete the entire brief and argument individually. They may also enter a voluntary tournament sponsored by the New Mexico Court of Appeals. The first year classes meet three times per week. Each section has approximately 20 students. There are also several individual student conferences with the legal writing instructor as well as small group brainstorming sessions with the instructor. There is also one teaching assistant assigned to each section. The other required writing is an upper level scholarly paper that requires approval by two readers who must be full time faculty at the law school.

Having just fully staffed our legal writing department with professional legal writing teachers, we are currently in the process of developing other elective writing courses to be offered to upper level students. These courses will include drafting (both litigation and non-litigation); advanced brief/persuasive writing; opinion writing; logic and rhetoric; scholarly writing. We anticipate adding some of these courses in the next academic year (2005-06). Currently offered is an advanced legal research course taught by library personnel. We also anticipate co-teaching some drafting and similar courses with substantive faculty. The legal writing faculty, along with the Director, are on one-year renewable contracts, have voting rights at faculty meetings (except on tenure and promotion decisions) and serve on committees. Instructors have under 50 students total, divided into two sections, and on a rotating basis will replace one first year section with an upper level writing course of their choosing. Salaries are below average according to the latest legal writing survey (but salaries of substantive, tenured faculty are also low at UNM). Legal Writing faculty members are generally treated as colleagues by other faculty. In sum, we have a very strong program that is growing stronger and does a fine job of preparing students for the real world practice of law.

An email address of someone who can answer questions about the program:

blumenfeld@law.unm.edu

J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

The required course component of the Rex E. Lee Advocacy Program at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, covers both the fall and winter semesters of the first year of law school. The first course, "Introduction to Legal Research and Writing," is a three-credit graded course that introduces the tools and techniques that are essential to law practice and legal scholarship: legal analysis, research using print sources (with electronic research introduced mid-semester), and objective writing. During fall semester, all students write three predictive office memoranda based on library research and complete a series of legal research quizzes, and a legal research final exam. Students’ final grades are based on their final memorandum (80%) and their legal research exam (20%). Students submit multiple drafts of each memorandum and receive written comments from both their professor and their teaching assistant. They also have the opportunity to hold individual conferences with their professor and his or her teaching assistants. The winter semester course, "Introduction to Advocacy,” is a two-credit, graded course that introduces the techniques of persuasive writing and oral advocacy via an appellate advocacy assignment and addresses additional research skills, particularly the use of full-text computerized databases (Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis). In the winter semester, the scenario from the fall semester's final research memo reappears and is developed into a trial record for use in briefing and arguing an appeal. Students add new research material to the materials found during fall semester's research, prepare an appellate brief, and have the opportunity to present an appellate oral argument. Throughout both semester students utilize technology designed to enrich their learning experience, including an online video to assist in learning to read cases, online citation tutorials, and electronic edits of written work.

A mix of professors teach the Advocacy Program classes. The program director, Kristin Gerdy, is a full-time faculty member with continuing faculty status (BYU’s version of tenure) and associate professor rank. She is on a twelve-month faculty contract and produces scholarship. Professor Gerdy teaches one full section (both the research and writing components) of 25 students in Introduction to Legal Research and Writing and Introduction to Advocacy. In addition, she teaches an upper-division seminar on Advanced Appellate Advocacy and teaches some of the Advanced Legal Research courses. In addition to publishing several scholarly articles, Professor Gerdy has served as a member of the ALWD Moot Court Committee and a member of the ALWD Board of Directors, and is currently President-Elect of ALWD, Chair of the ALWD/LWI Survey Committee, and a member of the LWI Board of Directors. She has also been active in the American Association of Law Libraries and has presented numerous programs at conferences for all three organizations. Five part-time faculty members teach the writing component of the remaining five sections of Introduction to Legal Research and Writing and Introduction to Advocacy. These part-time professors all maintain active law practices. They are on semester-by-semester contracts that can include summer contracts if needed to complete projects viewed as central to the Advocacy program’s needs. The part-time faculty members do not attend faculty meetings nor do they serve on faculty committees (with the exception of the Legal Writing Committee). Each part-time faculty member teaches a section of 25-27 students each semester. In addition to the teaching legal writing faculty, a part-time legal writing specialist with an extensive English teaching background is employed on a semester-by-semester contract to run the Legal Writing Center. Each member of the legal writing faculty has been involved in the national Legal Writing Institute (LWI), and the Director has been heavily involved in both LWI and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD). All five of the part-time faculty and the legal writing specialist have attended the biannual conference, and several have presented programs at the conferences. Legal research is taught by three members of the library faculty who work closely with their writing counterpart to insure class materials are synchronized and complementary. Finally, the Advocacy program employs nineteen upper-division teaching assistants who review student papers, meet with students, and provide research assistance when new problems are created. The teaching assistants receive six hours of training at the beginning of fall semester and meet regularly with their supervising professor. They work a maximum of ten hours per week and are compensated at the normal law school student rate.

CONTACT: Kristin Gerdy, (801) 422-9022, gerdyk@lawgate.byu.edu

Website: Course Page for Prof. Gerdy’s course: https://www.law2.byu.edu/Class/Fall/545-04f/L545-04.htm (username: law; password: school)

University of St. Thomas - Minnesota

The University of St. Thomas - Minnesota requires 3 semesters of Lawyering Skills, for a total of 8 credit hours, plus a 30-page upper-level writing project. In the first semester (3 credits), students learn basic research, common law and statutory analysis, legal writing, and citation form. Students write an open-research practice memo, a rewrite based on their professor’s written critique and a conference, and a longer graded open memorandum. There is a multiple-choice exam (100 questions) at the end of the course. In spring (3 credits), students cover basic ADR and advanced research, and they write an opinion letter based on a client interview. Then they write a motion brief to dismiss, and a motion brief for summary judgment, which they also argue orally. In the second year, students learn appellate brief writing and oral advocacy (2 credits). Finally, students satisfy their upper-level writing requirement either in a seminar or by writing a supervised research paper.

Lawyering Skills professors are on tenure-track. The school is divided into three departments (Lawyering Skills, Clinical Skills & Legal Studies); the faculty acts together on all matters except appointments and tenure (on which each department’s faculty has primary voting privileges). The scholarship requirements vary by department to reflect the demands of teaching, but tenure is granted by the university and is the same for all professors. Student loads are 40-42 per professor; all professors receive the same kind of titles, offices, admin support, and professional development funds. Starting salary is in the mid-60s. The second-year course is taught by adjunct professors who are appellate specialists in the legal community.

For more information, contact Ursula Weigold at uhweigold@stthomas.edu

BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL

Brooklyn Law School has a highly experienced full-time legal writing faculty and emphasizes individualized attention for each student. The director has tenure, and the faculty is a mix of long-term contracts and uncapped short-term contracts. The writing program receives further support from a full-time writing specialist, a full-time director of academic support, and an English as a Second Language adjunct. Legal writing faculty vote at faculty meetings, serve on committees, and are eligible for summer research stipends. These stipends have enabled the writing faculty to author four legal writing textbooks, Writing and Analysis in the Law (Walter and Fajans (with Shapo) rev. 4th ed. 2003); Scholarly Writing for Law Students (Fajans and Falk, 3d ed. forthcoming 2005); Writing for Law Practice, Fajans and Falk (with Shapo) 2004); and Appellate Advocacy: Principles and Practice (Cary (with Bentele) 4th ed. 2004). The director is a co-author of the Sourcebook on Legal Writing Programs. In addition, faculty members have written articles and presented papers that have influenced thinking in the field on such subjects as critical reading, integrating lawyering and legal writing, and applying linguistic theory to the composition of legal documents. Finally, the faculty has held a number of leadership positions in the field, serving on the AALS Legal Writing Section, the Board of the Legal Writing Institute, the American Bar Association’s Committee on Communication Skills, the Board of the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of ALWD.

In the program itself, classes are purposely small (a total of 40 students for each full-time writing faculty member) to facilitate opportunities for extensive one-on-one communication. In the mandatory first-year legal writing program, students are exposed to a broad range of skills during the two consecutive semesters of writing: they focus on the fundamentals of legal writing, analysis and research, are introduced to the process of client counseling and draft client opinion letters, and begin to develop the skills of written and oral appellate advocacy. Students have three formal conferences each year and many informal conferences. After the first year, the curriculum includes a wide variety of elective advanced writing courses that enable students to immerse themselves in legal writing. We have offered Fundamentals of Legal Drafting, Advanced Legal Writing, Writing for Law Practice, Appellate Advocacy, and a Scholarly Paper seminar.

Contact person: Marilyn R. Walter, Director of the Writing Program. Marilyn.Walter@brooklaw.edu

James E. Beasley School of Law of Temple University

Temple is a very large law school, and the LRW courses in the day division of the J.D. program are usually taught by the director, four full-time LRW professors, and six Graduate Fellows; the evening division courses are taught by eight adjunct faculty. The full-time faculty this year are Susan DeJarnatt, Jan Levine, Ellie Margolis, Douglas Miller (visiting), Kathryn Stanchi, and Bonny Tavares. We have a century’s worth of LRW teaching experience in our program, and each of our full-time professors taught LRW at other law schools for three to twelve years before coming to Temple. Professors Levine, DeJarnatt, Margolis, and Stanchi having been with the program since its inception in 1996-97 (Professors DeJarnatt and Stanchi are each on paid sabbatical for one semester this year). Professor Levine, the director, is tenured; professors DeJarnatt, Margolis, and Stanchi are in the fourth year of six-year contracts (and all were promoted to the rank of Associate Professor after extensive internal and external peer reviews). These four professors have produced over 25 scholarly pieces about legal writing from 1996 to 2004, resulting in citations in more than 150 books, treatises, and law review articles. We have offered many presentations at national conferences of the AALS, ALWD, and LWI; we have served on the boards of directors of ALWD, LWI, and Scribes; and we have worked on many committees for those organizations and the ABA. The full-time LRW professors are on contracts that comply with ABA Standard 405(c); they vote on all matters except awards of tenure, serve on all faculty committees, and are awaiting imminent salary increases which will result in pay parity with tenure-track faculty hires. The Graduate Fellows are experienced attorneys enrolled in a program resulting in an LL.M. in Legal Education. They teach one LRW section in their first year and a half-section in their second year, and since 1996, eight Graduate Fellows have taught legal writing at other law schools since leaving Temple. Professor Robin Nilon runs a separate writing program and writing center for international students in our LL.M. programs in Philadelphia and China.

Each professor in the J.D. writing program teaches one LRW section; in the day division the typical class size is thirty-two students, and in the evening the section size is six to ten students. Each professor comes up with his or her own 1-L courses within a shared general curricular framework, but the full-time faculty’s assignments are usually used by the Fellows and new adjuncts, who benefit from the guidance and mentoring of the five full-time LRW faculty. The program begins with an intensive week-long orientation before the other classes begin, and each LRW assignment integrates research, analysis, and writing. In the fall semester, the students prepare three office memoranda (of six, twelve, and sixteen pages in length) as well as outlines and short intermediate drafts for faculty review and critique. Each student has two required post-critique conferences with faculty, followed by a revision of the memo for further review. The spring semester course addresses persuasive writing via a twenty-five page appellate brief; a student will submit several drafts of portions of an appellate brief, and will have one scheduled conference with a faculty member, followed by another revision. The course ends with oral arguments judged by LRW faculty and Philadelphia-area lawyers and judges. Both 1-L LRW courses are fully graded, in the same manner as other 1-L courses. In addition, Temple requires all students to complete two upper-division advanced writing courses for graduation. Each of Temple’s LRW professors teaches a spring semester upper-division legal writing course (limited in size to 12 students) or a doctrinal seminar.

For more information, contact:
Jan M. Levine
Associate Professor
Director, LRW Program
Temple University School of Law
1719 North Broad St.
Philadelphia, PA 19122
jan.levine@temple.edu
tele. 215-204-8890

Case School of Law, Case Western Reserve University

New in 2003, the CaseArc Integrated Lawyering Skills Program, is an innovative six-semester program designed to coordinate experientially-based instruction in fundamental lawyering skills—such as interviewing, counseling, fact-gathering, legal research, writing, oral advocacy and negotiation—with more traditional classroom methods for teaching legal analysis. By merging the teaching of legal theory and policy, legal doctrine and lawyering skills, we believe that this program will create better informed and more capable lawyers.Our students are taught by teams of professors, each of whom brings special expertise to the common goal of providing a completely integrated approach to teaching law and lawyering. In the first semester, students learn the most fundamental lawyering skills of interviewing, counseling objective legal analysis and writing, and legal research. The course is linked with criminal law, torts or contracts. During the second semester, the course introduces negotiation skills, more advanced legal research, persuasive legal analysis and writing, and oral advocacy. It is linked with Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure or Property. The third semester focuses on transactional lawyering skills, corporate legal skills including negotiation and transactional drafting, and entity representation. The fourth semester, focuses on problem-solving and strategic thinking. Students identify and evaluate options to solve specific legal problems, develop strategies for accomplishing goals, and evaluate means/ends considerations, in litigation or transactional contexts. In the third year capstone experience, students participate in an intense research project and they elect a “reality-based” experiential program such as a Clinic, an externship, a lab, such as the War Crimes Research Lab, or an independent project. The CaseArc courses are planned so that each succeeding semester builds on the previous ones. Each course is linked to a subject students are studying. All of our students learn to grapple with increasingly complex life-like situations in the context of those subjects. From the first day of law school, they learn the essential skills of litigating cases and planning transactions. They learn how to represent individuals and they learn to represent corporations and other entities. They learn the complexities of problem-solving and strategic thinking. Finally, our students begin to face the ethical and professional challenges confronting contemporary lawyers in an increasingly competitive and complex world.

The CaseArc team includes 9 full-time instructors, 4 which are currently being reviewed for 405(c) status, 5 clinicians and 18 adjuncts who are practicing lawyers.

Contacts:
David Carney david.carney@case.edu
Peter Friedman peter.friedman@case.edu
Jonathan Gordon jonathan.gordon@case.edu
Kathryn Mercer kathryn.mercer@case.edu
(216)-368-5221

Washington University School of Law in St. Louis

The first-year Legal Research & Writing course at Washington University uses a collaborative teaching model that pairs full-time legal writing professionals with professional librarians, all of whom have law degrees. Each paired team is responsible for teaching two small sections of approximately 20-23 students per section. The LRW program is currently staffed by six full-time legal writing professionals (five of whom are senior lecturers with long-term renewable contracts and one of whom is a lecturer eligible for a long-term contract in two years) and six professional librarians (who also carry the lecturer title). Many of the legal writing teachers also teach upper-level courses and serve as faculty advisors for several of the law school’s moot court and lawyering skills competitions. Senior lecturers have voting rights on all matters except appointment and promotion of faculty. The position of director of the LRW program is rotated every two years among the senior lecturers. Changes in the leadership encourage development of new programmatic ideas and afford senior lecturers additional opportunities for professional development. New skills are developed and a sense of mutual “ownership” is achieved because the directorship is shared among the legal writing faculty.

The number of credits awarded for the successful completion of both semesters of the course is five credit hours (two credits in the fall semester/three credits in the spring semester) and the course is graded anonymously using the law school’s mean for all first-year courses. For the major projects in the fall, students draft two to three memoranda and complete one in-depth legal research project. In the spring, students draft several short assignments, two court briefs, and take a comprehensive research exam. Every fall, second and third year students are surveyed regarding the kinds of legal work they completed in their summer employment. Based on the survey results, the program is continually “tweaked” to ensure we are providing students with the skills they need to be successful. The small class size enables the legal writing teachers to conduct three to four individual office conferences per semester with students to evaluate students’ work product and provide individualized instruction. In addition, the legal writing teachers meet individually with students after they have completed their research for their memos and briefs to give them an opportunity to practice the skill of orally presenting the results of their research to a senior attorney prior to drafting. All first year students engage in oral arguments in the spring semester. When possible, the legal writing teachers take advantage of visits by the Eighth Circuit to the law school to have students draft a brief based on an appeal currently before the Court. The students are then able to hear the oral arguments in the case for which they prepared court briefs. The Samuel M. Breckinridge award is given annually to one student from each legal writing section to recognize excellent performance in the course. In addition to upper-level drafting courses and required seminars, Advanced Legal Research and Advanced Legal Writing are offered to students on an elective basis after the first year of law school.

E-Mail Contact: Ann Davis Shields, davis@wulaw.wustl.edu

Webpage:
http://law.wustl.edu/

Louisiana State University, Paul M. Hebert Law Center

The uniqueness of Louisiana’s bijural tradition and awarding of a dual degree (Juris Doctor, Bachelor of Civil Law) to all students is reflected in the legal writing course content. Legal writing faculty create assignments that require research and writing in state common law, federal law, and civil law jurisdictions in order to ensure a global and well-rounded introduction to analysis of the law.

The Legal Writing program at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center has a faculty of six full-time "Professors of Professional Practice" who teach approximately 35 - 40 students per semester. Faculty members are employed on three year contracts and have begun creation of professional practice tenure-track requirements to be submitted to the administration for review and consideration.


An email address of someone who can answer questions about the program: Grace Barry, Director gbarry1@lsu.edu

A website to gather information: www.law.lsu.edu

Then view the “Did You Know” powerpoint presentation;
Or
Select Academics and then “Legal Research & Writing Program” from the drop down menu.

Hofstra University School of Law

The legal writing program at Hofstra is a directorless program, with the instructors having full discretion to structure their classes in the manner they see fit, as long as they conform to the course description in the catalogue. Students at Hofstra are required to take two semesters of legal writing for a total of four credits. In Legal Writing, the students usually write four assignments–two drafts of a closed memorandum and two drafts of a trial memorandum. In Appellate Advocacy, the students write two drafts of an appellate brief, then argue that brief in front of a panel of judges. Instructors add additional assignments at their discretion. At Hofstra, we stress the importance of individual interaction with our students through mandatory conferences and office hours.

We have seven full-time instructors at Hofstra, who are eligible for full 405(c) status after five years. After they have completed a one-year probationary period, legal writing faculty have voting rights except for certain personnel matters, and the instructors fully participate as members of faculty committees. In addition to teaching legal writing, our faculty are free to teach other courses, produce scholarship, coach moot court teams, and perform other service to the law school. Having seven instructors allows us to maintain a ratio of 45 students or under per instructor. Hofstra's legal writing faculty has over forty years of combined experience teaching legal writing and appellate advocacy.

Contact person: Scott Fruehwald, lawesf@hofstra.edu .

Webpage: http://www.hofstra.edu/academics/law/law_instructors_list.cfm .

University of Arkansas School of Law (Fayetteville)

The legal research and writing program at the University of Arkansas School of Law (Fayetteville) includes three required semesters of LRW, a total of seven graded credits for each student. The program now begins during Orientation Week with a 12-hour introductory curriculum. In sections of 25-30, students are introduced to the state and federal legal systems, read and brief cases, begin using the law library, and start dissecting judicial opinions and debating their application to a hypothetical client's problem. LRW continues through the fall semester with a focus on basic research tools and strategies, and on objective legal analysis and memoranda. Full-time faculty review student drafts, provide written notes, and meet with students regularly one-on-one in at least two individual conferences during the term. In the spring semester, students try out their advocacy skills, writing an appellate brief and arguing their client's position before a "court" of local attorneys who volunteer their time each year, after a practice argument session with their LRW professor. The third semester of LRW exposes students to client letters, pleadings, motions, trial level briefs, and non-litigation drafting. Taught in seminar-sized groups of 15, students may also be asked to research and present a "CLE" for the class on a practice-oriented subject, or they may try their hands at negotiation and drafting of a settlement agreement. Elective upper-level opportunities for research and writing include skills classes, such as Drafting Legal Documents and Business Planning, that incorporate substantial drafting assignments.

The School of Law's LRW faculty contribute to the program's strength, and have also enhanced the Law School in many areas. The Director is tenured, and the four other faculty members all hold the rank of Clinical Associate Professor. They are eligible for reappointment for renewable three year periods. They vote at faculty meetings on all policy matters, serve on and chair faculty committees. In combination, the five LRW faculty members represent over forty-five years of LRW teaching experience.
Professor Kathryn A. Sampson, who has taught at the law school since 1993, coaches the school's National Moot Court team, has taught Elder Law and Insurance law, and has chaired the University's Distinguished Lecture Committee.
Professor Kim Coats, who has taught here since 1996, coordinates the Trial Competition, teaches a fall series of workshops on class preparation and exam skills, and coaches two moot court teams.
Professor Sharon E. Foster, who joined the faculty in 2000, has added expertise in International Law, offering a five week mini-course in International Legal Research and teaching International Business Transactions. After her arrival, the Law School began fielding a Jessup International Moot Court team, which she helps coach. She also advises the Women's Law Student Association and coaches the Negotiations team.
Professor Ann Killenbeck joined the LRW faculty for the 2004-05 year after a year as a Visiting Professor here.
Professor Killenbeck previously taught in the legal writing curriculum for four years, and has taught Social Science and the Law.
Professor Terry Jean Seligmann has directed the LRW program since 1997. She researches and writes on legal research and writing topics, and on special education law. She also teaches Education Law. She is active nationally and assumed the position of President of the Legal Writing Institute in July 2004.

Terry Jean Seligmann
Associate Professor and Director of Legal Research and Writing
University of Arkansas School of Law
Robert A. Leflar Law Center
Fayetteville, AR 72701
tselig@uark.edu

Moritz College of Law at Ohio State

Fall 1-L, required legal research, taught by librarians (1 credit), followed by small research project in small-section course (40students). Spring 1-L, required legal writing (2 credits), taught by tenured/tenure-track faculty (mostly), with some long-term contractclinicians who teach the course as an overload and receive a pay bump forit. No more than 2-3 clinicians teach, and the other 9-10 sections aretaught by tenured/tenure track faculty. 20 students per section. Some faculty rotate in frequently or teach every year, some less frequently.Typical course structure: 2 required major projects, at least 2 drafts each, conference and critique of the first draft are pretty much universal. Various faculty add various extras (e.g., oral argument,negotiation) as they wish. No universal syllabus, but some agreement on consistency of types of projects.
Fall 2-L, required app. ad (2 credits). Lectures by tenured director,critiquing, conferencing, and oral arguments judged by adjuncts. Use pending supreme court cases, 3 drafts, one practice argument judged by3-L's, one performance argument judged by adjunct + attorneys. Upper-level requirements: one seminar plus one other course that requires writing or skills.

An email address of someone who can answer questions about the program: Mary Beth Beazley: beazley.1@osu.edu

University of San Francisco

The Legal Research, Writing and Analysis Program at the University of San Francisco is one of the most rigorous and demanding in the state of California, if not the country. It is a two-semester, five-credit hour program directed by a tenured, full-time faculty member. The instructors, most of whom teach two sections, have practiced law for several years. The instructors are hired on one-year renewable contracts. The ratio of teacher to students never surpasses 1- 22, and this year (2004-05) is as low as 1-18 in several of the sections. The course is structured on a building-block philosophy and all the instructors teach the same material. The Director and the instructors meet weekly to prepare the upcoming week’s lesson plan. The grading is by letter grade and uses the same scale as that used by the first-year substantive courses.

In the fall semester, the program focuses on teaching legal writing and analysis in an objective setting. Students are required to draft a minimum of eight assignments, ranging in complexity from a simple research and analysis assignment to a complex memorandum of law. All the assignments are fully critiqued by the instructors. Students must meet strict standards and guidelines in drafting their assignments and follow the program’s “court rules” on citation and format. In the spring semester, the emphasis is on research skills and persuasive writing. Students are assigned significantly longer and more sophisticated documents including two complex points and authorities, also known as briefs in support of motions. A recently-hired instructor, who had been on law review at her top-tier school, commented that she wished she had had such a fine writing program at her law school.

Contact: Honigsbergp@usfca.edu
Peter Jan Honigsberg
Professor and Director, LRW&A Program

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