Updated Nov. 7, with details about Legal Writing and Rhetoric SIG.
I’m pleased to be chairing a panel at the 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication focusing on undergraduate legal writing courses. It takes place Friday, March 17, 03:30 pm – 04:45 pm
at Oregon Convention Center E142. There are five talented speakers, identified below.
I enjoyed helping with the panel proposal, which Lindsay Head spearheaded, and I’m looking forward to working with them to help draw connections among their presentations. Lindsay also led the effort to apply for a special interest group for this CCCC; the application was accepted, and it will happen 6:30 to 7:30 on the evening of Thursday, March 16th. If you teach a law-related writing course to undergrads or are interested in doing so, I urge you to attend.
Here is the panel proposal:
Creative Collaborations: Cultivating New Voices from the Undergraduate Legal Writing Community
140-character abstract: Emphasizing creativity and collaboration, panelists cultivate a space for legal writing in undergraduate English curricula.
Full proposal: Drawing from diverse backgrounds across disciplinary boundaries, this roundtable highlights the complexity of the undergraduate legal writing course and where it deviates and converges with traditional undergraduate writing pedagogies. Each demonstrating a distinct approach, panelists explore the importance of student collaboration and the recursive nature of writing, the process of initial course design and the implementation of a grading contract, the unique blending of pedagogical writing practices, the necessity for deep-revision strategies, and the specific challenge to equip students in a legal writing course outside the traditional purview of law schools. The panelists cultivate this distinctive discursive space, maintaining that legal writing should occupy a prominent space in our English curricula.
Speaker 1, Lisa Klotz, JD, PhD, Lecturer, University of California, Davis
In “Opening Arguments: Introducing Legal Discourse to Pre-Law Students,” Speaker 1, a former prosecutor and law-and-motion specialist, discusses her Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing course for pre-law students at her university. Specifically, she aims to prepare undergraduates for their first-year law school legal reasoning and writing course. Speaker 1 adapts materials used when she taught legal writing and advocacy in a law school, and she develops assignments that could be used in first-year legal writing classes. Assignments emphasize rule-based reasoning and reasoning by analogy/distinction. Speaker 1’s approach stresses the recursive nature of writing and the importance of revision and feedback (both oral and written). To that end, she requires students to work collaboratively in groups of four (“law firms”). This collaboration also helps prepare students for the kind of teamwork they’ll do in law school (study groups) and in the practice of law (colleagues).
Speaker 2, Lindsay Head, MA, JD, a PhD student at Louisiana State
In “Initial Implementation: Grading Contracts and Course Design in Undergraduate Legal Writing,” Speaker 2 builds on the foundations laid by scholars such as Ira Shor, Peter Elbow, Jane Danielewicz, and Asao Inoue to implement a grading contract in her undergraduate legal and professional writing course designed for students considering professions both inside and outside the law. Speaker 2 discusses the unique benefits and challenges of grading contracts in an undergraduate legal writing course. Teaching legal writing for the first time at any institutional level, Speaker 2 also reflects on her collaboration with practiced colleagues to develop a sound curriculum, along with teaching the undergraduate legal writing course itself. Ultimately, Speaker 2 emphasizes the importance of working with experienced colleagues when bringing novel approaches to the legal writing classroom.
Speaker 3, Antonio Elefano, MFA, JD, Lecturer, University of Southern California
In “And Justice for All: What Non-Lawyers Can Learn from Legal Writing,” Speaker 3 asks the question: how can an undergraduate legal writing course be informed by rhetoric and composition as well as creative writing pedagogies? Speaker 3—a former corporate litigator, rhet/comp writing fellow, and fiction writer—will discuss how he combined pedagogical practices from law school, legal practice, rhet/comp and creative writing to craft his Advanced Writing for Pre-Law Students course at a large research university. The writing assignments are evaluated under a rhetoric and composition lens (using the university’s writing program rubric), with an emphasis on clear and persuasive prose. Finally, borrowing from creative writing, Speaker 3 employs formal writing workshops, where students comment both orally and in essay form on other students’ assignments to sharpen their critical eyes and to forge a sense of collective responsibility. The result: a glimpse of law school and legal practice for prospective law students as well as a practicum in logic, argumentation, and professional writing for everyone else.
Speaker 4, Phil Mink, JD, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
In “The Rhetoric of the Law: Teaching Pre-Law Students to Write Like Judges,” Speaker 4, a former communications and antitrust lawyer, asks what is required to transform his pre-law students’ frequently chaotic language into prose that would work in a professional setting. Building upon the work of Joseph Williams, George Gopen, and other scholars, Speaker 4 will demonstrate a deep-revision strategy geared to paragraph structure, perhaps the most problematic area of writing for pre-law students. Most undergraduates write down their ideas not in the most logical order but in the order in which they occurred. Students are then left with the task of rearranging their sentences into coherent patterns, an absolute necessity for legal documents. Most students, however, lack this expertise, so the only way to teach them is to subject their writing to the same detailed revision process that an experienced writer would use. At the end of this challenging exercise, Speaker 4 shows how even those students who are ambivalent about the English language can develop a richer understanding of the rhetorical devices that will serve them well in their professional lives.
Speaker 5, Willie Schatz, JD, Lecturer, University of Maryland
In “Torts and Courts for Undergrads,” Speaker 5 draws from 17 years of teaching Legal Writing at his university and discusses the challenge of introducing prospective law students to the conventions of legal prose, a specialized form of writing that emphasizes logic and persuasion. In his quest to faithfully replicate the legal writing course his students will encounter in law school, he relies on scholars such as Helene Shapo, Richard Neumann, Michael Murray and Deborah Bouchoux. Speaker 5’s students learn how to read and write about cases, how to apply legal principles to factual scenarios, and how to analyze and synthesize the law and the facts. Most importantly, these future law students learn which rhetorical method will most move that audience. Speaker 5’s approach begins with students briefing cases in assault, battery, and false imprisonment. When convinced they understand the concept, students write memorandums based on fact patterns created by Speaker 5 and his colleagues. The students complete their preparation by writing a Memorandum Supporting a Motion for Summary Judgment from a factual scenario. The end to these means? Students become familiar and comfortable with rhetorical and writing techniques that surely scared them on their first day of class. Speaker 5 expounds upon this process through which students leave equipped to handle the (now less) difficult task of writing like the attorneys they hope to become.