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Apr 25, 2024
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LAW 3709 - Advanced Legal Writing
When the American Bar Foundation surveyed law firms hiring partners to discover how they decide whom to hire, the hiring partners ranked the quality of an applicant’s writing sample as one of the top five factors in the initial hiring decision – approximately as important as the identity of the law school the applicant attended. Ninety percent of the hiring partners said that they expect law school graduates to have learned legal writing completely in law school so that they can write at a professional level from the first day on the job. (See 43 J. Legal Educ. 469.) A writing sample is the only direct evidence of competence that an applicant can offer to an employer. This course aims to help students become professionally accomplished writers and develop their own best writing styles and work habits; to teach problem solving, fact reasoning, and other patterns of thought essential to law practice. Every assignment is rewritten after critique. (Cardozo said there is no such thing as writing; there is only rewriting.) Assignments may include litigation documents, a contract and an office memorandum (not the kind covered in the first-year Legal Writing course) as well as an appellate brief. The course may satisfy Writing Requirement II. Instructor’s permission needed for enrollment.
Prerequisites & Notes
Appellate Advocacy, Evidence.
Credits: 3
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