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.