Publication Date

2021

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

Sturm College of Law

Keywords

Lawyering process, Legal writing program, Legal pedagogy

Abstract

The life of the legal writing professor in today’s law schools is a challenging yet rewarding one. Out of necessity, over the last thirty years the pedagogy of legal writing has expanded to include much more than just writing skills—it has become every law student’s introduction to a broad set of basic lawyering skills and is more appropriately styled the Lawyering Process (LP). The increasing gravity and responsibility of the Lawyering Process course has led to expansion of credits given to the course and gradually to greater status and equity to the faculty who teach it, although most of us still lag the benefits and privileges of our tenured colleagues. Because of the dramatic evolution of the course and in the professionalism of the faculty who teach it, many traditional tenure-track faculty members do not really know or understand what we do now. This Article seeks to fill that gap — to bring our colleagues up to date on what we teach and how. It also seeks to help our colleagues understand what sort of support we want and need to be even better and more effective at teaching this critical course in law school. Finally, it is hoped that this Article will be helpful to faculty new to the task of teaching the Lawyering Process course so they will have a more complete understanding of the joys and challenges that await

Publication Statement

First published in 50:2 J. LAW & EDUC. 170 (2021). Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

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