Pondering Parentheticals:  Problems and Possibilities[1]    

Peggy Kline Kirkpatrick

Legal Writing Instructor  

Mitchell Hamline School of Law

Wendy Shea

ARTICLE

Before the Final Draft: Oral Argument as a Student-Centered Feedback Tool    

Stephanie Juliano

Assistant Professor of Practice

Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

Published: November 2023

Developing writing assignments can be one of the most challenging aspects of teaching first-year legal writing. Collaborating with other professors, using research assistants, and reworking old problems[1] can all make it easier.

1. Introduction

Recent revisions to ABA accreditation standards provide yet another exciting opportunity for faculty teaching lawyering skills[1] to position our courses as central to preparing students for excellence in professional practice, particularly in terms of offering opportunities for professional identity formation in the first-year curriculum.

One of the best ways to prepare students to practice in a modern and diverse world is to expose them to as many different types and styles of writing as possible. But, how do you do this in an upper-level writing class when limited both by time and by topic? Enter: The Best Upper-Level Legal Writing Assignment. Period. This an assignment that you can give in any upper-level legal class—no matter the topic—that will expose students to many styles and types of writing in a short period of time.

Are you “feedback literate”? Are your students? Do you design and deliver your legal writing course to hone your students’ feedback literacy and maximize the power of your feedback?

Despite an understandable desire to play ostrich—to dig our heads into the sand so we cannot see and, therefore, can entirely ignore what is about to happen—change is coming to legal education.

“When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written.”

            -Stephen Sondheim.[1]

As with the law itself, law students are always changing. And law professors should regularly consider how those changes will impact the classroom and our pedagogical approach. For our year-long Legal Writing course, the law students of 2021-22 surprised us with the careful and nuanced way they thought about language. Our 1L students were more interested in parsing the meaning, effect, and approach to potentially offensive language than any students we had taught before. We learned a lot from them.

At my law school, in addition to being a legal practice professor, I serve as Assistant Dean for Placement in the career services office. One of the primary challenges I face in this role is communicating important information that may impact a student’s career options.