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