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Legal Writing

Legal Writing Prof Blog

By law professors Coleen M. Barger, Sue Liemer and Nancy Soonpaa

Post Frequency: 31.6/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 15:42:31

LWI One-Day Workshops on December 3, 2010

Posted on July 26, 2010
Legal Writing Institute One-Day Workshops Friday, December 3, 2010 . The Legal Writing Institute will hold one-day workshops for legal writing faculty on the first Friday of December. . These workshops took place last year at two pilot locations: one...

Wojcik elected Secretary of Illinois Bar Association

Posted on July 26, 2010
Last Friday Mark Wojcik of The John Marshall Law School -- and co-editor of this blog -- was elected as Secretary of the Illinois State Bar Association. With more than 35,000 members, the ISBA is the largest voluntary state bar...

proposed changes to ABA standards effecting LRW jobs

Posted on July 25, 2010
This weekend, the ABA?s Standards Review Committee (SRC) is considering dramatic changes to law school accreditation standards that relate to tenure requriements, "security of position" for clinic professors, and "academic freedom" for legal writing professors...

proposed changes to ABA standards affecting LRW jobs

Posted on July 25, 2010
This weekend, the Standards Review Committee (SRC) for the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education considered dramatic changes to law school accreditation standards that relate to tenure requriements: "security of position" for clinic professors, and "academic freedom" for legal...

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LRW promotions at Cooley

Posted on July 24, 2010
The tenured faculty of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School voted to promote Norm Plate to Full Professor with Tenure, and to promote Tammy Asher to Associate Professor. Once the Board of Directors formalizes these promotions, Cooley?s legal writing faculty...

fix up your verbs

Posted on July 23, 2010
Back in 2001, I wrote a little advice column for the Illinois Bar Journal, on how to clean up your legal writing by focusing on the verbs. This week I got a request from a professor at another school for...

faculty status for law school librarians

Posted on July 22, 2010
Carol A. Parker (New Mexico) has written an article explaining "How Law Schools Benefit When Librarians Teach, Hold Faculty Status, and Contribute to the Development of Curricula of Legal Research Instruction". As her abstracts describes it: "This work in progress...

writing to lose

Posted on July 22, 2010
As the librarian who forwarded this to me said, "Who can resist this title:" Writing Bad Briefs: How to Lose a Case in 100 Pages or More" New York State Bar Association Journal, Vol. 82, No. 4, p. 64, May...

and the Silver Gavel goes too ...

Posted on July 21, 2010
Some of our readers may know legal writing professor Lisa McElroy (at Drexel) for her work on the Plain English feature over at Scotusblog. That blog has just received a 2010 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. In...

but, did you get it in writing?

Posted on July 21, 2010
We may be teaching legal writing, but apparently not enough people are following through, because Neil Joel Dillof at the University of Baltimore has written "Get it in Writing: A Litigator's Perspective" . As Neil explains: "A basic principle in...

Save the Date: The LWI Conference in 2012!

Posted on July 20, 2010
Save the date! The 2012 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute will take place at the JW Marriott Resort & Spa in Desert Springs, California, from May 29 to June 1, 2012. That's the week just after Memorial Day,...

A Fragment on Shall and May

Posted on July 19, 2010
Nora Tillman and Seth Barrett Tillman have authored a short (8 pages, lots of footnotes, VERY quick and easy to read) article called "A Fragment on Shall and May." It will be published in a future issue of the American...

Do the 5 Step.

Posted on July 19, 2010
If your lawyering skills courses include an introduction to ADR, take a look at the online ADR ethics resources from the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution. These free resources are outlined in Marnie Huff?s article Do the 5 Step: ABA...

How times have changed . . .

Posted on July 16, 2010
Although I was only at the Marco Island conference for a short time, the experience led me to ponder how the conferences have changed. I remember my first conference at Puget Sound in 1992 after I'd been teaching for one...

got a dissertation?

Posted on July 16, 2010
The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities invites submissions for its 2011 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the...

In Praise of Colons

Posted on July 15, 2010
In an economic recession, many writers may be able to afford only a semicolon instead of paying for a full colon. But fear not: Eileen Kavanagh (Thomas Cooley Law School) shares with us a new essay on the resurgance of...

The Common Law by O.W. Holmes . . . Updated and Digital!

Posted on July 15, 2010
A classic book on the reading list of many students entering law school in the fall is the classic by O.W. Holmes, The Common Law. Well, maybe that last sentence isn't so true anymore. The book has fallen off of...

As internet cheating increases, here's one professor's response: More in-class writing projects

Posted on July 15, 2010
From Monday's editorial in the New York Times entitled "Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)." A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins...

Save the Dates: Upcoming Legal Writing Conferences

Posted on July 15, 2010
Here are dates of upcoming legal writing conferences in 2010, 2011, and 2012: LWI One Day Workshops. Friday, December 3, 2010 (coast to coast at various locations). Global Legal Skills Conference VI. May 5-7, 2011 (in Chicago at The John...

a popcorn session

Posted on July 15, 2010
So what's a popcorn session? Well, if you're at an academic conference, and you've had a full day of serious presentations and you've already had dinner, but you're not quite ready to stop talking about things going on in your...

Legal writing specialist appeals dismissal of complaint alleging discrimination

Posted on July 14, 2010
It seems that there have been a number of recent lawsuits involving legal writing profs (several of which we've reported here over the last 12 months). Is that truly the case or is it just my perception because it's what...

Scholarship Grant Recipients

Posted on July 14, 2010
A number of professors received scholarship grants during the LWI Conference at Marco Island. Awards were conferred by the Legal Writing Institute, the Association of Legal Writing Directors, and LexisNexis. 2010 LWI Scholarship Grants Danton Berube (University of Detroit Mercy)...

International Negotiation Competition winners announced

Posted on July 14, 2010
A negotiation team from Texas Tech University School of Law recently won the International Negotiation Competition, held at Bond University on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The team was coached by professors Wendy Humphrey and Nancy Soonpaa, who both teach...

University of Cincinnati School of Law

Posted on July 13, 2010
The University of Cincinnati College of Law invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for as many as two tenure-track or tenured faculty positions in a broad number of areas, including agency/partnership/unincorporated business associations, civil procedure, commercial law, corporations, criminal...

TA's for your legal writing course

Posted on July 13, 2010
Still reporting about the LWI conference?s many excellent sessions, as time allows: Megan McAlpin, Suzanne Rowe, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, and Andrea Mooney gave a presentation on Investing in the Future: Creating Effective Teaching Assistants. They focused on defining TA?s multiple roles,...

federal court cites Sarah Ricks's articles

Posted on July 12, 2010
Rutgers-Camden Clinical Professor Sarah Ricks's article, The Perils of Unpublished Non-Precedential Federal Appellate Opinions: A Case Study of the Substantive Due Process State-Created Danger Doctrine in One Circuit, 81 Wash. L. Rev. 217 (2006), was cited by a federal district...

Scholarship alert: "The Cost of Judicial Citation: An Empirical Investigation of Citation Practices in the Federal Appellate Courts"

Posted on July 12, 2010
This article is by Casey R. Fronk and can be found at U. Ill. J.L. Tech. & Pol'y 51 (2010). From the abstract: Since the early 1960s, computerized legal research technology has enabled judges and their law clerks to access...

resistance is futile ...

Posted on July 12, 2010
American University's Washington College of Law is planning a third How Legal Rhetoric Shapes the World colloquium for October 15-16, 2010. This colloquium will focus on legal writing scholarship. If you have written or are working on something either on...

The Marco Island Survey

Posted on July 11, 2010
If you attended the LWI Conference at Marco Island, please remember to complete the survey about that conference. Your views will help the organizers of the next conference, which will be held from May 29 to June 1, 2012 in...

U.S. Department of Education Announces Procedures for Law Student Loan Repayments

Posted on July 10, 2010
This doesn't affect legal writing or its teaching directly, but it affects our students so we're happy to share this information with you. The U.S. Department of Education announced the requirements, definitions, eligibility criteria, and procedures for the implementation of...

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