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Legal Writing Prof Blog 

By law professors Coleen M. Barger, Sue Liemer and Nancy Soonpaa
Post Frequency: 31.6/day Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 15:42:31 Recent Entries: 2529
Go to Legal Writing Prof Blog, find other Legal Writing blogs, or browse all law blogs.
Greetings to the SEALS Conference
Posted on August 03, 2009The Southeast Association of Law Schools (SEALS) is holding its annual meeting this week in Palm Beach, Florida. Click here for links to the final conference program (which includes many legal writing professors) as well as other information about SEALS...
Updates on the Situation at DePaul
Posted on August 02, 2009The Law Library Blog has an important update on the situation at DePaul University College of Law and the outrageous failure of the ABA to address the firing of the law school dean in its accreditation report. Click here to...
ABA Panelists Say It is Nearly Impossible to Find Accurate Law Text Online
Posted on August 01, 2009Lynda Edwards, a reporter (not Linda Edwards the legal writing professor) covering the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, wrote that panelists at one session yesterday declared that it is almost impossible to find accurate texts of some laws...
Scribes Presents a Special Award to the Legal Writing Institute to Celebrate the LWI Silver Anniversary
Posted on August 01, 2009Scribes, The American Society of Legal Writers, held its Annual Luncheon today in Chicago during the ABA Annual Meeting. The 2009 Brief Writing Award went to Bridget Burke, Stephanie Holcombe, and Justin Jenson of the South Texas College of Law....
conference on interviewing and counseling
Posted on July 31, 2009UCLA School of Law and Brigham Young University Law School have announced that their second conference on the pedagogoy of interviewing and counseling will take place on October 16 & 17, 2009, at UCLA. If you are interested in participating...
Scholarship alert: "Professional skills and values in legal education: the GPS model"
Posted on July 31, 2009This one comes to us from Professors Gerald Hess of Gonzaga and Stephen Gerst from Phoenix School of Law. It can be found at 43 Val. U. L. Rev. 513 (2009). From the introduction: An old story about life: A...
New edition of Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage out now!
Posted on July 31, 2009Hup two and grab this while it's still fresh and warm from the oven. Here's the link to the publisher and here's another link to Joe Hodnicki's short review on the Law Librarian Blog. Hat tip to Joe. I am...
A review of two new entries in the competition to serve your online legal research needs
Posted on July 31, 2009I must confess, i hadn't heard of these two service before reading this article. I'm assuming they are both commercial (i.e. pay to play) services but the article doesn't make that 100% clear. I'm talking about Casemaker and Fastcase. If,...
Typos cost money - a lot of it
Posted on July 31, 2009Here's a list of recent examples of typos in legal documents that not only put the lawyers involved in hot water, but may also cost the client a lot of money. 1. Incorrect date in real estate document could cost...
In legal writing - groupings is where it's at.
Posted on July 31, 2009According to this editorial from the New Jersey Law Journal: Legal writing is all about groupings -- sets and subsets, and categories. These are the building blocks of logic. Accurate sets and subsets (accurate categories) increase the efficiency with which...
ALWD conference photo gallery
Posted on July 31, 2009Click on the images above to see legal writing professors at the ALWD conference, held in mid-July at UMKC School of Law. hat tip: Karen Mika (spl)
make courtroom nerves work for you
Posted on July 30, 2009Janet Metzger is an actress and adjunct law professor who teaches lawyers how to use theater techniques to improve their oral communications. She presented some easy techniques at the applied legal storytelling conference, and has posted one of those on...
images of applied legal storytelling
Posted on July 30, 2009The Legal Writing Institute's banner greeted conference participants. LWI Prez Ruth Anne Robbins & ALWD Prez, Mary Beth Beazley. Six LWI presidents toasted us. (pictured: Ruth Anne Robbins, Chris Rideout, Mary Beth Beazley, Ken Chestek, Steve Johansen) Chris Rideout presents...
quotable
Posted on July 29, 2009Those of you who have been teaching legal writing for some time likely know Professor Susan Brody, who was an LRW pioneer at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. At last week's applied legal storytelling conference, she gave a...
volume 6 of J. ALWD is here!
Posted on July 28, 2009This news comes from Editor Linda Berger: The Fall 2009 issue of J. ALWD (Vol. 6) is now available on the J. ALWD website. The issue focuses on "best practices" in persuasion and includes general articles as well. The print...
Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities: Call for papers and participation
Posted on July 28, 200913th Annual ASLCH Conference March 19-20, 2010 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities is an organization of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistic legal scholarship. It will be accepting proposals for...
Do you have a 1L story to share?
Posted on July 28, 2009The UMKC Law Review devotes part of one issue each year to a collection of ?Law Stories? ? short tales about various aspects of the legal world. For the next edition, the theme will be One-L Revisited. An introduction by...
YouTube features AALS video, "The Case for Legal Writing"
Posted on July 28, 2009The second of two videos created by the Media Committee of the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning and Research, titled "The Case for Legal Writing," focuses on the importance of legal writing to law practice. The other video, "Benefits...
AALS video, "Benefits of Legal Writing," premieres on YouTube
Posted on July 27, 2009The Media Committee of the AALS Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning and Research has recently released two videos demonstrating the importance of legal research and writing instruction in legal education. The first appears below. The committee plans to make the...
English legal storytelling
Posted on July 26, 2009Although the excellent applied Legal Storytelling conference has ended, there is still much to report, as time allows. Robert McPeake, from The City Law School in London, presented a paper he is working on with Marcus Soanes, asking Why Isn't...
basing decisions on life experience
Posted on July 24, 2009The Senate Judiciary Committee should have been at LWI's Applied Storytelling Conference today. In the opening plenary session, Ruth Anne Robbins and Steve Johansen presented This Is Your Brain on Stories. They first gave us a working definition of the...
Blackwell Award recipient announced
Posted on July 24, 2009Those of us attending the Applied Legal Storytelling conference were sworn to secrecy until it could be announced on the legal writing listserves first, but now that's done, we can announce here the recipient of the 2010 Blackwell Award: Steve...
Convictions
Posted on July 23, 2009The Attorney General of Oregon, John Kroger, opened the Applied Legal Storytelling conference in Portland last night, telling a few stories from his book, Convictions. He used to work as a federal prosecutor, and if you have ever stood in...
Hey Professor! You are what you wear.
Posted on July 22, 2009Or maybe not, according to a recent study by an educational psychologist who found that "how academics dress for a lecture doesn't affect how students perceive them ?at least in the long run." Here's more: Yasmine L. Konheim-Kalkstein, who holds...
Study shows more than 75% of minority female attorneys leave firms within 5 years
Posted on July 22, 2009That's a rather stunning statistic (although if you work for the guy in the post below, it's not hard to understand). The online ABA Journal is reporting today that research by a company called Catalyst produced the report which is...
Work-life balance - the employer's perspective
Posted on July 22, 2009These days, newly minted law grads looking for a job are more nervous and anxious than a horny toad stuck on a Texas freeway with its hopper busted. It can be downright scary. That's because the pendulum has swung to...
ABA Journal launches website to track "legal rebels" who are responding to changing market
Posted on July 22, 2009We have a saying around the offices of ye olde Legal Writing Prof Blog: When legal writing profs talk, people listen. Accordingly, in response to the growing consensus that we're in the midst of not just a temporary market downturn,...
Scholarship alert: "'Sending Down' Sabbatical: Lawyering in the Legal Services Trenches Has Benefits for Professor and Practitioner Alike"
Posted on July 21, 2009Professors Suzanne Rabe of Arizona and Stephen Rosenbaum of Berkeley have just authored the above article available on SSRN here. This work-in-progress has been generating some very positive buzz according to our insider Professor Mary Beth Beazley. From the abstract:...
Does removing computers from the classroom improve teaching?
Posted on July 21, 2009One of SoMo's deans seems to think so according to this story from The Chronicle of Higher Ed: College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled "smart" classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture...
Continuing the Celebration of the Legal Writing Institute Silver Anniversary: A Video Discussion with Christopher Rideout, Laurel Oates, Anne Enquist, Lori Lamb, and Ralph Brill
Posted on July 21, 2009The first "official" Legal Writing Institute conference was held at the University of Puget Sound in 1984. The Institute was officially incorporated the year after that, and the Seattle area remained the home of the Legal Writing Institute for 20...
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Did I harass someone?
Oh, yes. This can be taken in as so many things, especially since you had testif...
How to evict a roommate?
First, in most jurisdictions "self-help" is not a remedy available to any party ...
I have worked for this employer for only three weeks. The employer makes up his own rules as to what he chooses to report for the purpose of property taxes. He tells me to "let them come after us". He defines Entertain
He arrogantly insists, "let them come after us." Well, if you are invo...
Can a probation officer make a decision that involves a medical decision and prohibit a person from leaving a state to get medical help?
well if you could get him to a mental health facility they could screen him for ...
This has happened 3 or 4 times a month now- they have turned the electric off 2 days consecutively, the water off about 9 or 10 times now, and our heat has broken 5 times (once it would not shut off, and we were forced t
i say stick with the apartment. eventually, everything possible will be replaced...

Did I harass someone?
Oh, yes. This can be taken in as so many things, especially since you had testif...
How to evict a roommate?
First, in most jurisdictions "self-help" is not a remedy available to any party ...
I have worked for this employer for only three weeks. The employer makes up his own rules as to what he chooses to report for the purpose of property taxes. He tells me to "let them come after us". He defines Entertain
He arrogantly insists, "let them come after us." Well, if you are invo...
Can a probation officer make a decision that involves a medical decision and prohibit a person from leaving a state to get medical help?
well if you could get him to a mental health facility they could screen him for ...
This has happened 3 or 4 times a month now- they have turned the electric off 2 days consecutively, the water off about 9 or 10 times now, and our heat has broken 5 times (once it would not shut off, and we were forced t
i say stick with the apartment. eventually, everything possible will be replaced...








