INFORMATION:

The University of Miami is proud to host the 2016 Southeastern Legal Writing Conference on January 29-30, 2016.  Please mark your calendars and watch for a call for proposals soon.  We expect the event to begin in the early afternoon on Friday and run a full day on Saturday.

 In addition to soliciting 25-minute and 50-minute proposals, we will also host several panel discussions.  We hope that individuals from different schools will come together for lively discussions on varied topics.  As part of the call for proposals, we will solicit interested speakers for these panels.  Possible topics include the following: 

• Student Scholarly Writing.  How do you supervise students’ law review articles or independent study papers?  What is your commenting process?  Do you set deadlines for students, or do students direct their own schedules?  How many drafts do you review?
• Professional Development.  What's the next step in your career?  How do you keep your teaching from getting stale?  Has the division of your time between teaching, scholarship, and service changed over the years, and do you see it changing in the future?  How do you set and achieve professional goals? 
• Legal Scholarship.  Does your scholarship focus on legal writing topics and/or pedagogy or on other areas of interest?  Where do you prefer to publish: in law reviews, on blogs or other websites, in bar association journals, with journals such as Perspectives and The Second Draft?  When do you find time to write?  When and how do you solicit outside feedback on your drafts?
• Teaching Legal Research.  Who teaches legal research in your first-year courses—you, law librarians, outside vendors?  How much class time do you allocate to research?  What methods have you used to get students excited about research?  How do you assess your students’ research skills?

 If there are additional panel topics you would like to propose, please email me at rachelhsmith@gmail.com or my colleague Alyssa Dragnich at adragnich@law.miami.edu.  We hope to see you in Miami next January!