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the 2002 Golden Pen Award.
The Legal Writing Institute, a 1300-member international
organization dedicated to improving legal writing, recently
presented its second Golden Pen Award to Don LeDuc, dean of
the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. The Institute honored Dean
LeDuc for his long-standing support of law-school legal-writing
programs and teachers. The Institute presented the award in
a ceremony at the 2002 annual meeting of the Association of
American Law Schools, held in January in New Orleans.
More than 15 years ago, Dean LeDuc took a remarkable step
in legal education: he put his legal-writing teachers on the
tenure track. He was the first law-school dean to put writing
teachers on tenure track and keep them there. And over the
years, he has publicly and repeatedly urged the American Bar
Association to improve its standards for legal-writing teachers.
In his acceptance remarks, LeDuc noted that the ABA standards
for accrediting law schools require that they provide at least
two rigorous writing experiences; in fact, the ABA standards
make legal writing one of the few courses that law schools
must teach. But according to LeDuc, "the ABA then endorses
a scheme that relegates those who teach legal writing to the
second- and third-string faculty." The ABA standards
do not require law schools to provide job security for legal-writing
teachers.
Only a handful of law schools in the United States place
their legal-writing teachers on tenure track. Most schools
offer their teachers long- or short-term contracts only, and
a number of these schools do not renew those contracts: once
the contract ends, the teacher must leave, thus guaranteeing
that first-year law students will receive their legal-writing
instruction primarily from a corps of inexperienced teachers.
The constant turnover of a large percentage of legal-writing
teachers contributes to the recurring complaints of the public
- and the legal profession itself - about the quality of legal
writing. According to Dean LeDuc, "If the legal-education
community wishes to respond to the criticisms of the bench
and bar and to prepare its graduates for practice, it should
abandon its double standard toward legal-writing and skills
teachers and admit them to full partnership." He said
that law schools must overcome the elitism that favors professors
who teach doctrinal courses (like contracts or property law)
over teachers who teach actual lawyering skills.
Likewise, schools must recognize that legal doctrine finds
its application in legal writing. A guest speaker at the Golden
Pen ceremony, federal judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern
District of Texas, said that the usefulness of whatever students
learn in doctrinal courses depends on legal writing, which
"fuses culture and analysis in exposition." Thus,
as Judge Hughes put it, "the work done in legal-writing
courses empowers the student to have a useful role in the
economy, in our society, and in law."
Dean LeDuc acted on that same view many years ago. In accepting
the Golden Pen Award, he said that it "recognizes my
support of what the Legal Writing Institute holds dear - the
plain-English movement, the campaign for better writing within
the legal profession, and, especially, the effort to achieve
equal status for legal-writing professors within law schools."
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