Legal Commentary

There is wide variation among LRW programs.  Generally speaking, though, they teach a set of practical lawyering skills that students are unlikely to get from their doctrinal classes.  The most obvious of these skills is the ability to produce certain genres of legal documents, usually including predictive memoranda and briefs, and also (in some programs) case briefs, letters, file memos, contracts, or judicial opinions.  Many programs also introduce students to legal research techniques (more on that in another post) and oral argument.

But this is a very narrow way of thinking about these problems--really just a recitation of the types of assignments that students are likely to complete in an LRW course; this description doesn't account for the broader goals that LRW programs aspire to.

Here's how I would frame it: doctrinal classes, per the old trope, teach students to think like lawyers; lrw programs teach (or should teach, or should try to teach) students how to act like lawyers.  To put it otherwise, the major preoccupation of first semester doctrinal courses is to teach students how to read and understand the law, while the goal of the LRW program is to teach students to use the law to help a real person solve her real life problem using a set of professional tools.

In my next posts, I will explain why I think it is useful to think of an LRW program in this way, and more broadly, why it is worthwhile for us--primarily doctrinal faculty, but also law schools more generally--to think about LRW programs at all.  I'll then tackle the practical aspects of LRW program: how to implement the goal I have identified; who should teach LRW; how to think about IRAC; teaching research; and so forth.