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.