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.

Several months ago, a Touro colleague and I were talking about ourselves as writers and about our writing—published and unpublished. My colleague expressed interest in reading some of my work; I took this as a compliment. “Fine,” I said. “And I’d like to read some of your work, too.” There was no problem—until I tried to select some of my already published fiction and creative nonfiction to share. What was good enough? Serious enough? Interesting enough? What would my colleague, a distinguished author of scholarly books, think about my work?