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.
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.
posted by LRW Programs at
3:53 PM
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