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.

Let’s slow down. Do less. Aim low. This may be controversial to say, but I believe we legal writing professors need to accomplish less in our first-year courses.           

Being a teacher of legal writing can be overwhelming and intimidating. A legal writing teacher has so much work to do prior to getting in the classroom, and then once in the classroom, a legal writing teacher must manage what happens during class. Moreover, a legal writing teacher must divide time between tasks that occur after class, such as grading students’ work and conferencing with them.

1. Introduction

Theme is vitally important in persuasive advocacy, whether written or oral. It took me several jury trials and a few seasons coaching high school mock trial to feel like I understood how to persuasively use a theme as a lawyer. Thus, I wanted to develop an exercise that helped first-year law students begin to grasp the idea of using a theme to advocate for their client. I created an exercise using opening statements from prominent criminal jury trials.

The last two years have been unprecedented for most legal skills faculty. Having to flip the legal writing classroom and teach in online Zoom rooms became the norm. Gone were the days of seeing colleagues in the hallway, faculty lounge, or stopping by someone’s office. It became harder to stay connected and build relationships. But to a select few, such as myself, the asynchronous and synchronous online teaching modality is where we began.

(originally published May 1997)

What writing teacher has not encountered bizarre and incoherent sentences, sentences that seem to teeter on the very edges of syntactic and semantic psychosis?