Volume 2 includes a range of articles addressing approaches to teaching legal analysis, research, and writing.

Maureen J. Arrigo, Hierarchy Maintained: Status and Gender Issues in Legal Writing Programs

Lorraine Bannai, Anne Enquist, Judith Maier, and Susan McClellan, Sailing Through Designing Memo Assignments

Ted Becker and Rachel Croskery-Robert, Avoiding Common Problems in Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory and Experience

Camille Lamar Campbell, How to Use a Tube Top and a Dress Code to Demystify the Predictive Writing Process and Build a Framework of Hope During the First Weeks of Class

Susan L. DeJarnatt, Law Talk: Speaking, Writing, and Entering the Discourse of Law

Peter Dewitz, Reading Law: Three Suggestions for Legal Education

Anne M. Enquist, Unlocking the Secrets of Highly Successful Legal Writing Students

Judith D. Fischer, How to Improve Student Ratings in Legal Writing Courses: Views From the Trenches

Brian J. Foley and Ruth Anne Robbins, Fiction 101: A Primer for Lawyers on How to Use Fiction Writing Techniques to Write Persuasive Facts Sections  

Ian Gallacher, Forty-Two: The Hitchhiker's Guide to Teaching Legal Research to the Google Generation

Kristin B. Gerdy, Teacher, Coach, Cheerleader, and Judge: Promoting Learning through Learner-Centered Assessment

Elizabeth L. Inglehart, From Cooperative Learning to Collaborative Writing in the Legal Writing Classroom

M. H. Sam Jacobson, A Primer on Learning Styles: Reaching Every Student

Steven J. Johansen, "What Were You Thinking?": Using Annotated Portfolios to Improve Student Assessment

Aliza B. Kaplan and Kathleen Darvil, Think [and Practice] Like a Lawyer: Legal Research for the New Millennials

Lawrence S. Kreiger, What We're Not Telling Law Students -- and Lawyers-- That They Really Need to Know: Some Thoughts-In-Action Toward Revitalizing the Profession From Its Roots    

Paula Lustbader, Teach in Context: Responding to Diverse Student Voices Helps All Students Learn   

Laurel Currie Oates, Beating the Odds: Reading Strategies of Law Students Admitted Through Alternative Admissions Programs  

Kristen K. Robbins, Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric to Validate Legal Reasoning

Jennifer L. Rosato, All I Ever Needed to Know About Teaching Law School I Learned Teaching Kindergarten: Introducing Gaming Techniques into the Law School Classroom  

Suzanne E. Rowe, Legal Research, Legal Writing, and Legal Analysis: Putting Law School Into Practice   

Sophie M. Sparrow, Describing the Ball: Improve Teaching by Using Rubrics-Explicit Grading Criteria

Kent D. Syverud, Taking Students Seriously: A Guide for New Law Teachers

Grace Tonner and Diana Pratt, Selecting and Designing Effective Legal Writing Problems   

Judith B. Tracy , “I See and I Remember; I Do and Understand" Teaching Fundamental Structure in Legal Writing Through the Use of Sample   

Robin S. Wellford-Slocum, The Law School Student-Faculty Conference: Towards a Transformative Learning Experience

Volume 3 includes articles addressing various theoretical approaches to teaching legal analysis, research, and writing. It includes representative foundational articles, which remain critically important for understanding the development of legal writing as a field. The articles are presented chronologically to facilitate the reader's understanding of the growth and development of the field.

Linda L. Berger, Applying New Rhetoric to Legal Discourse: The Ebb and Flow of Reader and Writer, Text and Context

Linda L. Berger, A Reflective Rhetorical Model: The Legal Writing Teacher as Reader and Writer

Linda H. Edwards, The Convergence of Analogical and Dialectic Imaginations in Legal Discourse

Suzanne Ehrenberg, Embracing the Writing-Centered Legal Process

Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, Against the Tyranny of Paraphrase: Talking Back to Texts

Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, Comments Worth Making: Supervising Scholarly Writing in Law School

Jessie C. Grearson, Teaching the Transitions

Leigh Hunt Greenhaw, "To Say What the Law Is": Learning the Practice of Legal Rhetoric

Mary Kate Kearney and Mary Beth Beazley, Teaching Students How to "Think Like Lawyers": Integrating Socratic Method with the Writing Process   

Philip C. Kissam, Thinking (By Writing) About Legal Writing

Pamela Lysaght and Cristina D. Lockwood, Writing-Across-the-Law-School Curriculum: Theoretical Justifications, Curricular Implications   

Ellie Margolis and Susan L. DeJarnatt, Moving Beyond Product to Process: Building a Better LRW Program

Andrea McArdle, Teaching Writing in Clinical, Lawyering, and Legal Writing Courses: Negotiating Professional and Personal Voice

Teresa Godwin Phelps, The New Legal Rhetoric

J. Christopher Rideout, Voice, Self, and Persona in Legal Writing

J. Christopher Rideout and Jill J. Ramsfield, Legal Writing: A Revised View

Kristen K. Robbins-Tiscione, A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory and Practice in the Legal Writing Classroom

Marjorie Dick Rombauer, First-Year Legal Research and Writing: Then and Now   

Nancy Soonpaa, Using Composition Theory and Scholarship to Teach Legal Writing More Effectively

Kathryn M. Stanchi, Resistance is Futile: How Legal Writing Pedagogy Contributes to the Law's Marginalization of Outsider Voices

Christine M. Venter, Analyze This: Using Taxonomies to "Scaffold" Students' Legal Thinking and Writing Skills

Joseph M. Williams, On the Maturing of Legal Writers: Two Models of Growth and Development   

Volume 4 reprints important articles on the development and range of upper-level legal writing seminars. It also includes articles that can be used to supplement advanced writing courses because of their focus on legal documents and accompanying concerns and themes.

Linda L. Berger, Studying and Teaching "Law as Rhetoric": A Place to Stand

Linda L. Berger, What Is the Sound of a Corporation Speaking? How the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor Can Help Lawyers Shape the Law

Barbara J. Busharis and Suzanne E. Rowe, The Gordian Knot: Uniting Skills and Substance in Employment Discrimination and Federal Taxation Courses

Stacy Caplow, Putting the "I" in Wr*T*Ng: Drafting an A/Effective Personal Statement to Tell a Winning Refugee Story

Kenneth D. Chestek, The Plot Thickens: The Appellate Brief as Story

Susan L. DeJarnatt, In re MacCrate: Using Consumer Bankruptcy as a Context for Learning in Advanced Legal Writing

Elizabeth Fajans, Learning From Experience: Adding a Practicum to a Doctrinal Course

Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, Untold Stories: Restoring Narrative to Pleading Practice

Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, Comments Worth Making: Supervising Scholarly Writing in Law School

Celeste M. Hammond, Borrowing From the B Schools: The Legal Case Study as Course Materials for Transaction Oriented Elective Courses: A Response to the Challenges of the Maccrate Report and the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching Report on Legal Education

Stephanie Roberts Hartung, Legal Education in the Age of Innocence: Integrating Wrongful Conviction Advocacy Into the Legal Writing Curriculum

Robert C. Illig, Teaching Transactional Skills Through Simulations in Upper-Level Courses: Three Exemplars

Claire R. Kelly, An Evolutionary Endeavour: Teaching Scholarly Writing to Law Students

Ellie Margolis, Beyond Brandeis: Exploring the Uses of Non-Legal Materials in Appellate Briefs

Karl S. Okamoto, Teaching Transactional Lawyering

Anne E. Ralph, Not the Same Old Story: Using Narrative Theory to Understand and Overcome the Plausibility Pleading Standard

J. Christopher Rideout, Twice-Told Tale: Plausibility and Narrative Coherence in Judicial Storytelling

Ruth Anne Robbins, Painting With Print: Incorporating Concepts of Typographic and Layout Design Into the Text of Legal Writing Documents

Jennifer Sheppard, Once Upon a Time, Happily Ever After, and in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Using Narrative to Fill the Cognitive Gap Left by Overreliance on Pure Logic in Appellate Briefs and Motion Memoranda

Michael R. Smith, Alternative Substantive Approaches to Advanced Legal Writing Courses

Michael R. Smith, Levels of Metaphor in Persuasive Legal Writing

Kathryn M. Stanchi, Playing With Fire: The Science of Confronting Adverse Material in Legal Advocacy

Kathryn M. Stanchi, The Power of Priming in Legal Advocacy: Using the Science of First Impressions to Persuade the Reader

Tina L. Stark, Thinking Like a Deal Lawyer

Patricia M. Wald, The Rhetoric of Results and the Results of Rhetoric: Judicial Writings

Once Upon a Time in Law: Myth, Metaphor, and Authority

Volume 5 begins with a few of the central articles on rhetoric, tracing its development over time and its emergence as a topic of interest in legal discourse. The volume then  zeroes in on the following topics:

• Rhetoric as a Resource for Scholarship or Teaching

• Rhetorical Analyses of Legal Language

• Rhetorical Analyses: Metaphor and Analogy

• Rhetorical Analyses: Narrative

Linda L. Berger, Linda H. Edwards, and Terrill Pollman, The Past, Presence, and Future of Legal Writing Scholarship: Rhetoric, Voice, and Community

Richard Boyd, Narratives of Sacrificial Expulsion in the Supreme Court’s Affirmation of California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” Law

Bruce Ching, Argument, Analogy, and Audience: Using Persuasive Comparisons While Avoiding Unintended Effects

Linda H. Edwards,

Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, Shooting from the Lip: United States v. Dickerson, Role [Im]mortality, and the Ethics of Legal Rhetoric

Michael Frost, Introduction to Classical Legal Rhetoric: A Lost Heritage

Deborah S. Gordon, Letters Non-Testamentary

Cathren Koehlert-Page, Like a Glass Slipper on a Stepsister: How the One Ring Rules Them All at Trial

Carol McCrehan Parker, The Perfect Storm, the Perfect Culprit: How a Metaphor of Fate Figures in Judicial Opinions

Thomas Michael McDonnell, Playing Beyond the Rules: A Realist and Rhetoric-Based Approach to Researching the Law and Solving Legal Problems

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, Toward a Disciplinary Pedagogy for Legal Education

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students to Write Any Legal Document

Kristen K. Robbins Tiscione, Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric to Validate Legal Reasoning

Jennifer Murphy Romig, Legal Blogging and the Rhetorical Genre of Public Legal Writing

Michael R. Smith, Levels of Metaphor in Persuasive Writing

Karen J. Sneddon, Speaking for the Dead: Voice in Last Wills and Testaments

Kathryn M. Stanchi, Feminist Legal Writing

Gerald B. Wetlaufer, Rhetoric and Its Denial in Legal Discourse

James Boyd White, Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life

Volume 6 includes timeless articles on classic moot court concepts and timely articles with current critiques and suggested reforms.

Larry Cunningham, Using Principles From Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Nervousness in Oral Argument or Moot Court

Edward K. Cheng and Scott Farmer, A Normalized Scoring Model for Law School Competitions

Jason K. Cohen, Attorneys at the Podium: A Plain-Language Approach to Using the Rhetorical Situation in Public Speaking Outside the Courtroom

Sabrina DeFabritiis, Lost in Translation: Oral Advocacy in a Land Without Binding Precedent

Darby Dickerson, In re Moot Court

James D. Dimitri, Stepping up to the Podium With Confidence: A Primer for Law Students on Preparing and Delivering an Appellate Oral Argument

Barbara K. Gotthelf, The Lawyer’s Guide to Um

Michael V. Hernandez, In Defense of Moot Court: A Response to “In Praise of Moot Court—Not!”

Michael J. Higdon, Oral Argument and Impression Management: Harnessing the Power of Nonverbal Persuasion for a Judicial Audience

Alex Kozinski, In Praise of Moot Court—Not!

Mark R. Kravitz, Written and Oral Persuasion in the United States Courts: A District Judge’s Perspective on Their History, Function, and Future

Barbara Kritchevsky, Judging: The Missing Piece of the Moot Court Puzzle

Gerald Lebovits, Drew Gewuerz, and Christopher Hunker, Winning the Moot Court Oral Argument: a Guide for Intramural and Intermural Moot Court Competitors

Mairi N. Morrison, May It Please Whose Court: How Moot Court Perpetuates Gender Bias in the Real World of Practice

Susie Salmon, Reconstructing the Voice of Authority

Nancy L. Schultz, Lessons from Positive Psychology for Developing Advocacy Skills

Richard H. Seamon, Preparing for Oral Argument in the United States Supreme Court

Louis J. Sirico, Jr., Opening an Oral Argument before the Supreme Court: The Decline of Narrative’s Role

Stephanie A. Vaughan, Persuasion Is an Art . . . But It Is also an Invaluable Tool in Advocacy 

Volume 7 is an in-depth guide to the most important topics for new teachers from designing assignments to learning from student evaluations. The Monograph first published The New Teacher's Deskbook in 2011.  The Editorial Board had a difficult time narrowing down the many excellent articles on teaching and scholarship in our field.  We hope the results are useful to new legal writing professors, as well as anyone who wants an update on relatively recent scholarship.

Sarah J. Adams-Schoen, Of Old Dogs and New Tricks—Can Law Schools Really Fix Students’ Fixed Mindsets?

Lorraine K. Bannai, Challenged X 3: The Stories of Women of Color Who Teach Legal Writing

Jacob Carpenter, Persuading With Precedent: Understanding and Improving Analogies in Legal Argument   

Alexa Z. Chew, Citation Literacy   

Jessica Clark and Christy DeSanctis, Toward a Unified Grading Vocabulary: Using Grading Rubrics in Legal Writing Courses

Kirsten A. Dauphinais, Sea Change: The Seismic Shift in the Legal Profession and How Legal Writing Professors Will Keep Legal Education Afloat in its Wake   

Kirsten K. Davis, “The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated”: Reading and Writing Objective Legal Memoranda in a Mobile Computing Age

Kirsten K. Davis, The Rhetoric of Accommodation: Considering the Language of Work-Family Discourse

Miriam E. Felsenburg and Laura P. Graham, A Better Beginning: Why and How to Help Novice Legal Writers Build a Solid Foundation by Shifting Their Focus From Product to Process

Elizabeth Ruiz Frost, Feedback Distortion: The Shortcomings of Model Answers as Formative Feedback

Laura P. Graham, Why-Rac? Revisiting the Traditional Paradigm for Writing About Legal Analysis

Emily Grant, Helicopter Professors

Anna P. Hemingway, Accomplishing Your Scholarly Agenda While Maximizing Students’ Learning (a.k.a., How to Teach Legal Methods and Have Time to Write Too)

Michael J. Higdon, The Legal Reader: An Expose

Cassandra L. Hill, Peer Editing: A Comprehensive Pedagogical Approach to Maximize Assessment Opportunities, Integrate Collaborative Learning, and Achieve Desired Outcomes

Paula J. Manning, Word to the Wise: Feedback Intervantion to Moderate the Effects of Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity on Law Students   

Ellie Margolis and Kristen Murray, Using Information Literacy to Prepare Practice-Ready Graduates   

Patricia Grande Montana, Bridging the Reading Gap in the Law School Classroom   

Mark Osbeck, What is "Good Legal Writing" and Why Does it Matter?   

Terrill Pollman, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Examples and Model-Based Learning in the Classroom

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students to Write Any Legal Document   

Toree Randall , Meet Me in the Cloud: A Legal Research Strategy That Transcends Media   

Suzanne Rowe, Out of the Glass Cockpit: Teaching Legal Analysis in Legal Research   

Julie M. Spanbauer, Mind the Gap: Teaching Research as a Fluid, Everpresent Concept in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Classroom

Amy Vorenberg, Strategies and Techniques for Teaching Legal Analysis and Writing

Laura A. Webb, Why Legal Writers Should Think like Teachers

Melissa H. Weresh, Uncommon Results: The Power of Team-Based Learning in the Legal Writing Classroom   

Beth H. Wilensky, Assignments With Intrinsic Lessons on Professionalism (Or, Teaching Students to Act Like Adults Without Sounding Like a Parent)   

Volume 8 collects articles on the timely and important topic of legal writing and technology. The topics addressed in this volume include the use of technology in the legal research process, the role of technology in the classroom and in providing feedback to students, critical writing and reading skills in the digital age, the benefits of memo and e-communication assignments in the digital age, and more.

Daniel L. Barnett, “Form Ever Follows Function”: Using Technology to Improve Feedback on Student Writing in Law School

Mary Beth Beazley, Writing (and Reading) Appellate Briefs in the Digital Age

Debra Moss Curtis and Judith R. Karp, "In a Case, In a Book, They Will Not Take a Second Look!" Critical Reading in the Legal Writing Classroom  

Kirsten K. Davis, “The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated”: Reading and Writing Objective Legal Memoranda in a Mobile Computing Age   

Joe Fore, The Comparative Benefits of Standalone Email Assignments in the First-Year Legal Writing Curriculum   

William E. Foster and Andrew L. Lawson, When to Praise the Machine: The Promise and Perils of Automated Transactional Drafting

Ian Gallacher, Do RoboMemos Dream Of Electric Nouns?: A Search For The Soul Of Legal Writing

Shailini George , Teaching the Smartphone Generation: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Learning in Law School

Lindsey P. Gustafson, Texting and the Friction of Writing

Kristin J. Hazelwood, Technology and Client Communications: Preparing Law Students and New Lawyers to Make Choices That Comply With the Ethical Duties of Confidentiality, Competence, and Communication

    Steve Johansen and Ruth Anne Robbins, Art-Iculating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning

Katrina Fischer Kuh, Electronically Manufactured Law

Kartina June Lee, Process Over Product: A Pedagogical Focus on Email as a Means of Refining Legal Analysis   

James B. Levy, Teaching the Digital Caveman: Rethinking the Use of Classroom Technology in Law School

Ellie Margolis, Is the Medium the Message? Unleashing the Power of E-Communication in the Twenty-First Century

Ellie Margolis, It’s Time to Embrace the New— Untangling the Uses of Electronic Sources in Legal Writing

Samantha A. Moppett, Control-Alt-Incomplete? Using Technology to Assess “Digital Natives”   

Elizabeth G. Porter, Taking Images Seriously

Toree Randall, Meet Me in the Cloud: A Legal Research Strategy That Transcends Media

Jennifer Murphy Romig, Legal Blogging and the Rhetorical Genre of Public Legal Writing  

Julie M. Spanbauer, Mind the Gap: Teaching Research As A Fluid, Ever Present Concept in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Classroom, 66 Mercer L. Rev. 651 (2015)

Mark Yates, Text Is Still a Noun: Preserving Linear Text-Based Literacy in an E-Literate World

Additional Recommended Reading

1. Kari Mercer Dalton, Their Brains on Google: How Digital Technologies are Altering the Millennial Generation’s Brain and Impacting Legal Education, 16 SMU Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 409 (2013), https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1206&context=scitech

2. John O. McGinnis & Russell G. Pearce, The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services, 82 Fordham L. Rev. 3041 (2014), https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5007&context=flr

3. Dana Remus & Frank Levy, Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law, 30 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 501, 519 (2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2701092

Volume 9 collects articles on a topic that is both timely and of longstanding importance: legal writing and social justice. The volume includes articles on incorporating critical theory, narrative, and storytelling into legal writing pedagogy, and how these approaches can ingrain the importance of social justice in students, help students confront implicit biases, and develop empathetic understanding. Other articles suggest incorporating social justice into the legal writing curriculum through pro bono collaborations or hybrid legal writing and doctrinal courses. The volume also includes pieces on theory, including how the stories told in legal writing can advance or harm visions of social justice.

Mary Nicol Bowman, Engaging First-Year Law Students Through Pro Bono Collaborations in Legal Writing

Catherine Greene Burdett & Eden Harrington, Law Schools Working Together To Increase Access to Justice

Rosa Castello, Incorporating Social Justice into the Law School Curriculum with a Hybrid Doctrinal/Writing Course

Richard Delgado, Storytelling For Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative

Linda H. Edwards, Telling Stories in the Supreme Court: Voices Briefs and the Role of Democracy in Constitutional Deliberation

Lorraine Bannai & Anne Enquist, (Un)Examined Assumptions and (Un)Intended Messages: Teaching Students to Recognize Bias in Legal Analysis and Language

Kristen Clement & Stephanie Roberts Hartung, Social Justice and Legal Writing Collaborations: Promoting Student Engagement and Faculty Fulfillment

Stephanie Roberts Hartung, Legal Education In The Age of Innocence: Integrating Wrongful Conviction Advocacy Into The Legal Writing Curriculum

Aliza B. Kaplan, How To Build A Public Interest Lawyer (And Help All Law Students Along The Way)

Tal Kastner, Policing Narrative

Camille Lamar Campbell, Who's Gonna Take The Weight: Using Legal Storytelling To Ignite A New Generation Of Social Engineers

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, The Practical Implications of Unexamined Assumptions: Disrupting Flawed Legal Arguments to Advance the Cause of Justice

Michael A. Millemann & Steven D. Schwinn, Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year

Samantha A. Moppett & Kathleen Elliott Vinson, Closing The Legal Aid Gap One Research Question At A Time

Kate O’Neill, But Who Will Teach Legal Reasoning and Synthesis?

Anne E. Ralph, Narrative-Erasing Procedure

Spencer Rand, Teaching Law Students To Practice Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Search For Help Through Social Work's Empowerment Approach

Nantiya Ruan, Experiential Learning in the First-Year Curriculum: The Public-Interest Partnership

Nantiya Ruan, Student, Esquire? The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom

Ann L. Schiavone, Writing the Law: Developing the ‘Citizen Lawyer’ Identity through Legislative, Statutory, and Rule Drafting Courses

Kathryn M. Stanchi, Resistance is Futile: How Legal Writing Pedagogy Contributes to the Law's Marginalization of Outsider Voices

Volumes 10 and 11 collect articles on a core legal writing topic: legal storytelling. Lawyers tell stories in a variety of contexts. This volume attempts to collect representative articles on legal storytelling from various perspectives. The volume includes articles on the basics of storytelling and on techniques that can be used by practicing lawyers. The volume also includes articles on the storytelling that takes place in non-traditional contexts, including transactional documents. Finally, the volume includes articles analyzing the stories told in significant legal cases. 

Mario L. Barnes, Black Women's Stories and the Criminal Law:  Restating the Power of Narrative

Linda L. Berger, Creating Kairos at the Supreme Court: Shelby County, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, and the Judicial Construction of Right Moments

Linda L. Berger, How Embedded Knowledge Structures Affect Judicial Decision Making: A Rhetorical Analysis of Metaphor, Narrative, and Imagination in Child Custody Disputes

Linda L. Berger, Metaphor and Analogy: The Sun and Moon of Legal Persuasion

Linda L. Berger, The Lady, or the Tiger? A Field Guide to Metaphor and Narrative

Todd A. Berger, A Trial Attorney’s Dilemma: How Storytelling as a Trial Strategy Can Impact the Criminal Defendant’s Successful Appellate Review

Stacy Caplow, Putting the “I” in Wr*t*ng: Drafting an A/Effective Personal Statement to Tell a Winning Refugee Story

Susan M. Chesler & Karen A Sneddon, Happily Ever After: Fostering the Role of the Transactional Lawyer as Storyteller

Susan M. Chesler & Karen A Sneddon, From Clause A to Clause Z: Narrative Transportation and the Transactional Reader

Susan M. Chesler & Karen A Sneddon, Tales from a Form Book: Stock Stories and Transactional Documents

Susan M. Chesler & Karen A Sneddon, Telling Tales: The Transactional Lawyer as Storyteller

Kenneth D. Chestek, Competing Stories: A Case Study of the Role of Narrative Reasoning in Judicial Decisions

Kenneth D. Chestek, Judging by the Numbers: An Empirical Study of the Power of Story

Kenneth D. Chestek, The Life of the Law Has Not Been Logic: It Has Been Story

Kenneth D. Chestek, The Plot Thickens: The Appellate Brief as Story

Linda H. Edwards, Once Upon a Time in Law: Myth, Metaphor, and Authority

Linda H. Edwards, Where Do the Prophets Stand? Hamdi, Myth, and the Master’s Tools

Elizabeth Fajans & Mary R. Falk, Untold Stories: Restoring Narrative to Pleading

Brian J. Foley & Ruth Anne Robbins, Fiction 101: A Primer for Lawyers on How to Use Fiction Writing Techniques to Write Persuasive Facts Sections

Kimberly Y.W. Holst, Non-Traditional Narrative Techniques and Effective Client Advocacy

Jeanne M. Kaiser, When Truth and the Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn from the Experience of Non-Fiction Writers About the Limits of Legal Storytelling

Edward J. Larson, Tales of Death: Storytelling in the Physician-Assisted Suicide Litigation

John Leubsdorf, The Structure of Judicial Opinions

Lori Johnson, Redefining Roles and Duties of the Transactional Lawyer: A Narrative Approach

Gerald Lopez, Lay Lawyering

Tracey McCants Lewis, Legal Storytelling: The Murder of Voter ID

George A. Martinez, Philosophical Considerations and the Use of Narrative in Law

Philip N. Meyer, Vignettes from a Narrative Primer

Binny Miller, Give Them Back Their Lives: Recognizing Client Narrative in Case Theory

Binny Miller, Telling Stories About Cases and Clients: The Ethics of Narrative

Stephen Paskey, The Law is Made of Stories: Erasing the False Dichotomy Between
Stories and Legal Rules

Anne E. Ralph, Narrative-Erasing Procedure

Anne E. Ralph, Not the Same Old Story: Using Narrative Theory to Understand and Overcome
the Plausibility Pleading Standard

Anne E. Ralph, The Story of a Class: Uses of Narrative in Public Interest Class Actions Before
Certification

Christopher Rideout,  A Twice-Told Tale: Plausibility and Narrative Coherence in Judicial Storytelling

Ruth Anne Robbins, Fiction 102: Create a Portal for Story Immersion

Ruth Anne Robbins, Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers and Merlin: Telling the Client’s Story Using the Characters and Paradigm of the Archetypal Hero’s Journey

Jennifer Sheppard, Once Upon a Time, Happily Ever After, and in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Using Narrative to Fill the Cognitive Gap Left by Overreliance on Pure Logic in Appellate Briefs and Motion Memoranda

Louis Sirico, Benjamin Franklin, Prayer, and the Constitutional Convention: History as Narrative

Louis Sirico, How Law Employs Historical Narratives: The Great Compromise as an Example

Karen Sneddon, The Will as Personal Narrative

Carrie Sperling & Kimberly Y.W. Holst, Do Muddy Waters Shift Burdens?

Joanne Sweeny & Dan Canon, The Language of Love v. Beshaer: Telling a Client’s Story While Creating a Civil Rights Case Narrative

Melissa H. Weresh,  Wait, What? Harnessing the Power of Distraction or Redirection in Persuasion

Helena Whalen-Bridge, Negative Narrative: Reconsidering Client Portrayals

Volume 12 collects articles on the use and role of visuals in legal writing.  The selected articles touch on a range of topics, including the use of visuals in written legal analysis, persuasive briefs, contracts, statutes, and in the legal writing classroom. For additional reading on this topic, please see Ellie Margolis’ 2021 bibliography, Visual Legal Writing: A Bibliography, published at 18 Legal Commc’n & Rhetoric 195.

Thomas D. Barton, Gerlinde Berger-Walliser & Helena Haapio, Visualization: Seeing Contracts for What They Are, and What They Could Become, 19 J.L. Bus. & Ethics 47 (2013).

Mary Beth Beazley, Hiding in Plain Sight: “Conspicuous Type” Standards in Mandated Communication Statutes, 40 J. Legis. 1 (2014).

Mary Beth Beazley, Writing for a Mind at Work: Appellate Advocacy and the Science of Digital Reading, 54 Duq. L. Rev. 415 (2016).

Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, Robert C. Bird & Helena Haapio, Promoting Business Success Through  Contract Visualization, 17 J.L. Bus. & Eth. 55 (2011). 

Hillary Burgess, Deepening the Discourse Using the Legal Mind’s Eye: Lessons from Neuroscience and Psychology that Optimize Law School Learning, 29 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 1 (2011).

Kevin Conboy, Diagramming Transactions: Some Modest Proposals and a Few Suggested Rules, 16 Transactions: Tenn. J. Bus. L. 91 (2014).

Lisa Eichhorn, Old Habits: Sister Bernadette and the Potential Revival of Sentence Diagramming in Written Legal Advocacy, 13 Legal Commc’n & Rhetoric 79 (2016).

Lucille A. Jewel, Through a Glass Darkly: Using Brain Science and Visual Rhetoric to Gain a Professional Perspective on Visual Advocacy, 19 S. Cal. Interdisc. L.J. 237 (2010).

Steve Johansen & Ruth Anne Robbins, Art-iculating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning, 20 Legal Writing 57 (2015).

John H. Larsen, Using Visuals to Better Communicate Logic in Legal Reasoning, 25 Legal Writing 285 (2021).  

Lisa Tucker & Christine N. Coughlin, The Other Side of the Story: Using Graphic Organizers to Counter the Counter-Analysis Quandary, 39 U. Balt. L. Rev. 227 (2010).

Jay A. Mitchell, Whiteboard and Black-Letter: Visual Communication in Commercial Contracts, 20 Pa. J. Bus. L. 815 (2018).

Michael D. Murray, Cartoon Contracts and the Proactive Visualization of Law, 16 U. Mass. L. Rev. 98 (2021).

Michael D. Murray, Mise en Scene and the Decisive Moment of Visual Legal Rhetoric, 68 U. Kan. L. Rev. 241 (2019).

Michael D. Murray, The Ethics of Visual Legal Rhetoric, 13 Legal Commc’n & Rhetoric 107 (2016).

Jonah Perlin, Making Your (Power)Point: An Introductory Guide to Digital Presentation Design for Lawyers, 18 Legal Commc’n & Rhetoric 81 (2021).

Elizabeth G. Porter & Kathryn A. Watts, Visual Rulemaking, 91 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1183 (2016).

Elizabeth G. Porter, Taking Images Seriously, 114 Colum. L. Rev. 1687 (2014).

Ruth Anne Robbins, Painting with Print: Incorporating Concepts of Typographic and Layout Design into the Text of Legal Writing Documents, 2 J. ALWD 108 (2004).

Richard K. Sherwin, A Manifesto for Visual Legal Realism, 40 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 719 (2007).

Richard K. Sherwin, Neil Feigenson & Christina Spiesel, Law in the Digital Age: How Visual Communication Technologies Are Transforming the Practice, Theory, and Teaching of Law, 12 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 227 (2006).

Cecilia A. Silver, The Writing’s on the Wall: Using Multimedia Presentation Principles from the Museum World to Improve Law School Pedagogy, 126 Dick. L. Rev. 475 (2022).

Volume 13 collects articles in which authors explore legal writing through empirical analysis. The volume focuses on articles in which the authors conducted the empirical studies themselves, rather than articles that primarily summarized or commented on studies by others. Covering a wide range of topics, volume 13 provides interesting and insightful resources for legal writing professors and practitioners.  

Kevin Bennardo & Alexa Z. Chew, Citation Stickiness, 20 J. App. Prac. & Process 61 (2019).

Kenneth D. Chestek, Fear and Loathing in Persuasive Writing: An Empirical Study of the Effects of the Negativity Bias, 14 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 1 (2017).

Kenneth D. Chestek, Judging by the Numbers: An Empirical Study of the Power of Story, 7 J. ALWD 1 (2010).

Brad Desnoyer, E-Memos 2.0: An Empirical Study of How Attorneys Write, 25 Legal Writing 213 (2021).

Adam Feldman, Counting on Quality: The Effects of Merits Brief Quality on Supreme Court Decisions, 94 Denv. L. Rev. 43 (2016).

Sean Flammer, Persuading Judges: An Empirical Analysis of Writing Style, Persuasion, and the Use of Plain English, 16 Legal Writing 183 (2010).

Joe Fore, A Court Would Likely (60–75%) Find . . . Defining Verbal Probability Expressions in Predictive Legal Analysis, 16 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 49 (2019).

Susan Hanley Kosse & David T. Ritchie, How Judges, Practitioners, and Legal Writing Teachers Assess the Writing Skills of New Law Graduates: A Comparative Study, 53 J. Legal Educ. 80 (2003).

Brian N. Larson, Precedent as Rational Persuasion, 25 Legal Writing 135 (2021).

Mike Madden, Stating It Simply: A Comparative Study of the Quantitative Readability of Apex Court Decisions from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 23 N.C. J.L. & Tech. 270 (2021).

Scott A. Moss, Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting the Poor Quality of Plaintiffs’ Briefs, Its Impact on the Law, and the Market Failure It Reflects, 63 Emory L. J. 59 (2013).

Michael D. Murray, The Promise of Parentheticals: An Empirical Study of the Use of Parentheticals in Federal Appellate Briefs, 10 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 229 (2013).

Louis N. Schulze, Jr., Transactional Law in the Required Legal Writing Curriculum: An Empirical Study of the Forgotten Future Business Lawyer, 55 Clev. St. L. Rev. 59 (2007).

Stacy Rogers Sharp, Crafting Responses to Counterarguments: Learning from the Swing-Vote Cases, 10 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 201 (2013).

Shaun B. Spencer, Using Empirical Methods to Study Legal Writing, 20 Legal Writing 141 (2015).

Shaun B. Spencer & Adam Feldman, Words Count: The Empirical Relationship Between Brief Writing and Summary Judgment Success, 22 Legal Writing 61 (2018).

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Charlotte S. Alexander, Karl Branting, Paul Morawski, Carlos Balhana, Craig Pfeifer, & Sam Bayer, Does Lawyering Matter? Predicting Judicial Decisions from Legal Briefs, and What That Means for Access to Justice, 100 Texas L. Rev. 1157 (2022).

Christopher R. Trudeau, The Public Speaks: An Empirical Study of Legal Communication, 14 Scribes J. Legal Writing 131 (2012).

Christine M. Venter, The Case Against Oral Argument, 14 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 45 (2017).