Teaching the Habits of Law School Success: Lessons from the Legal Writing Classroom
The conversations we already have
Preparing the Fake Judge: How to Write Effective Bench Memos for Oral Argument Exercises
“Know your audience.” It’s evergreen legal writing advice. And it’s advice to remember when addressing the very specific audience for the bench memo in an oral argument simulation: a fake judge.
Teaching Judgment in the Face of Uncertainty
I. Navigating uncertainty in legal writing
Locating Ethos in the Age of AI
Shortly after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I was doing what most of us were doing: testing it, poking at it, trying to figure out what it could and couldn’t do. On a whim, I asked it to write a love poem for my husband. It produced something earnest, rhyming, and profoundly mediocre. I called him into the room. “I wrote you a poem,” I said, and read it aloud with as much feeling as I could muster.
Redesigning Empathy Maps with GenAI
Introduction
What We Learned From Taking a New Writing Class: Perspectives on Learning and Empathy for 1L Students
Last fall, we independently decided to register for new writing classes to challenge ourselves, expand our writing skills, and regain insight into the beginner’s mindset that our 1L students adopt as they learn legal research and writing. We both expected more growth than challenge.
Leadership, Ethics, and Lifting Weights: Teaching Persuasive Legal Writing in the AI Era
In the world of legal writing instruction, we’re in a transition not unlike the one agricultural workers faced when they moved from animal-powered to steam-powered farming equipment. In the pre-industrial era, many humans had agricultural jobs that involved significant physical labor. Some built muscles and motor memory naturally as they guided a horse-drawn plow. Then the industrial and technological revolutions arrived.
Assessing Research Skills in the Age of Generative AI: Asking Questions that Machines Cannot Answer
Large Language Models (LLMs) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it easier than ever for students to outsource legal research and writing, circumventing the learning process and posing an existential threat to the concept of academic integrity and honesty. Students need only produce a prompt of no more than a few sentences describing their assignment to receive a polished, high-quality piece of work within minutes.
Introducing First-Year Legal Writing Students to the Multifaceted Nature of Facts
Introduction
Each Fall, legal writing professors introduce students to the structure and format of the interoffice memo. The memo, of course, is the product we ask students to create to show their mastery of producing a written legal analysis. Before the Discussion section of the interoffice memo, however—the section in which that analysis is communicated—there is the Statement of Facts. I have not spent much time instructing students on the Statement of Facts beyond providing them with strategies for organizing facts clearly and effectively.