“This is where they got it wrong with ‘this rock’ and ‘that rock.’ It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll.” –Keith Richards

According to some experts, 2020 will be the year of the QR code. Remember QR codes? They were interesting for a while but also annoying because you needed an app to scan them.

Dear students:

I hope you experienced productive summers and are enjoying your second year of law school. As you begin submitting law clerk applications for next summer, I encourage you to revisit the memoranda and briefs that you completed in my legal writing class last year. With revision, they would make appropriate writing samples to accompany your applications. I’m sorry that I’m not on campus to help you polish your written work product. I’ve decided to use my sabbatical year to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.

On the day of my first graduate creative-writing workshop, my professor walked into class with a stack of papers in hand. All twelve of us grew quiet; the week before, he’d brought a similarly sized stack that had turned out to contain copies of the original first page of a story my classmate had turned in as a revision. My professor had brought the original to show how it was possible to revise the life out of a story, and he methodically worked through the original first page as compared to the new one to make his point.

     When it comes to martial arts, I’m definitely a late bloomer. My husband convinced me to try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (“BJJ”) during my first year of teaching legal writing at Pepperdine, when I was just shy of my thirty-ninth birthday. I was hesitant, having no prior martial arts experience; he told me it was a good way to get in shape (leaving out the part about rolling around on the ground trying to choke people). But like many BJJ practitioners, I quickly became obsessed with the sport.

     1.  Introduction

Few question that experiential education in law school is important: various reports have

Introduction

“What’s in a name?” Juliet famously asks in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Few experiences have impacted my approach to being a teacher like being a student. In 2012, I entered the Ph.D. program in Higher Education and Student Affairs at the University of Iowa while teaching legal writing full-time. I hadn’t been a student for 23 years, and it was both exciting and nerve-wracking to enter the classroom again. In addition, I was entering the classroom at the age of forty-two—much, much older than most of the other students, and sometimes older than the teacher.

Dear LWI Colleagues,

I’m having a hard time believing this will be my last Letter from the President before my term ends. The time has flown by, and as a community dedicated to improving the teaching and discipline of legal writing and the status of legal writing faculty, we have done a tremendous amount of good work together.

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