Article. Abstract:
Legal
writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course;
it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students’ and
new attorneys’ knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced
legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a
hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their
work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge
of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing
practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first,
the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close work on
legal writing assignments provides a unique opportunity for
less-experienced attorneys to engage in meaningful dialogue with
more-experienced attorneys, with the assignment acting as a catalyst for
the transfer of knowledge of law and legal practice from expert to
novice; and lastly, meaningful feedback on legal writing provides an
opportunity for more-experienced attorneys to evaluate and critique a
less-experienced attorney’s thinking, including her analysis of
substantive law and legal concepts, as well as her professional
decision-making. Indeed, legal writing projects afford legal novices an
invaluable opportunity to apply their knowledge of the law, engage
legal experts through work on discrete matters, and receive useful
individual guidance on the substance of their work and their judgment on
practice matters.
While legal writing classes are
well-established as fundamental courses in the modern law school
curriculum, particularly during the first year, the many benefits of
legal writing have not been fully realized in law school teaching.
Given recent demands for law schools to produce students who are better
prepared to meet the demands of legal practice, the time has come for
law schools to take a fresh look at the role of writing in legal
education. This Article articulates a plan for law schools going
forward that will help bridge the gap that currently exists between
legal theory and practice in legal education. The paper argues that to
better prepare law students for practice, law school teaching must
consistently go beyond the acquisition of knowledge of the law, and more
frequently include the application of this knowledge to a client’s
legal problem. As legal writing provides a particularly useful
opportunity for students to engage in the meaningful study of law and to
apply their knowledge of law in a practice context, this article brings
legal writing into the current “practice-ready” debate. This Article
urges law schools to rethink the role that legal writing can play in
preparing students for the challenges of today’s legal practice, and to
increase the quantity and quality of legal writing practice
opportunities in their curriculums.