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Liemer, S P --- "Many Birds, One Stone: Teaching the Law You Love, in Legal Writing Class" [2004] LegEdDig 13; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 18

Many Birds, One Stone: Teaching the Law You Love, in Legal Writing Class

S P Liemer

[2004] LegEdDig 13; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 18

53 J Legal Educ 2, 2003, pp 284–294

When selecting or creating problems and other teaching materials for a Legal Research and Writing (LRW) course, the teacher has an endless variety of substantive law and fact patterns from which to choose. This article seeks to bring to the attention of LRW colleagues the many career-enhancing benefits of doing more in our teaching than only covering the compulsories.

The subject matter of LRW problems can provide many learning opportunities for law students beyond fundamental lawyering skills. Some LRW teachers base a problem on an underlying procedural matter, or set it in a particular procedural posture, to strengthen the students’ understanding of both civil procedural and lawyering skills. Legal writing assignments also may focus directly on issues of professionalism and lawyering ethics.

Besides enriching the students’ educational experience, adding any of these dimensions to the LRW course may fortuitously enrich the teacher’s experience too. Perhaps most important to the careers of LRW teachers, students who are more satisfied with the course will assess it more positively. At some law schools, increasing the profile and reputation of the LRW program, by innovating to meet some of the goals described above, may create an opportunity to upgrade the status or terms of employment of the LRW faculty.

Beyond the multifaceted learning that carefully chosen assignment topics can provide for LRW students, there are many ways in which these choices can become, quite purposely, directly beneficial to the teacher. LRW teachers should be alert not to miss opportunities to forward their own professional careers through the choices they make when preparing teaching materials.

Anyone who reads through piles of LRW papers several times a year can easily choose topics for those papers from areas of the law they find fascinating. Beyond simply being able to teach the same skills, LRW faculty who love the underlying law in their assignments actually enhance their teaching. A teacher’s natural enthusiasm for the subject, and that you convey to your students, is one of your most effective teaching tools. One of the best benefits of being an LRW teacher is that you can enjoy the situation of learning about new areas of the law throughout your career.

In fact, when a teacher knows an area of law very well and uses it for an LRW assignment, it is likely the problem will be particularly well crafted. The teacher will know what pitfalls may occur in certain research paths, where the lines of case analysis branch off, or how a statute really works, and can plan the assignments and lessons accordingly. A teacher with less experience with that body of law is more likely to create an assignment with flaws. In addition, the students are likely to discover that you are one of the school’s resident experts in that area of the law. Many students will appreciate the realism inherent in an LRW assignment based on practice expertise.

Others enter law teaching as a way to have an influence on the system of justice. LRW teachers who have social reform goals, and who create assignments that raise their students’ awareness, may gain benefits quite different from increases in salary or prestige. As practitioners help shape the law, the people who taught them their lawyering skills may shape the ways they use those skills. LRW teachers can keep influencing a new crop of law students’ job choices and law graduates’ on-the-job choices.

In addition, teaching the law you love, whether a single LRW assignment or by gaining permission to teach an entire doctrinal course, may help you develop new ideas for scholarship, which can in turn greatly enhance your career. Teaching a new course or pursuing scholarship in an area of particular interest may help you avoid legal writing burnout.

LRW assignments chosen for many of the purposes described above may contribute to further blurring the lines between the worlds of legal skills training and doctrinal teaching. Most prominent among the ‘many birds’ referred to in the author’s title for this article may well be the duck, as in ‘if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck’.

LRW faculty at more and more law schools are showing they can teach aspects of substantive law, procedural law, professional responsibility, ethics, and critical theory as effectively as doctrinal law teachers. As both LRW faculty and doctrinal faculty broaden their approaches to teaching and scholarship, their roles within the law school increasingly overlap. Allowing ourselves to enjoy multiple roles is a fundamental source of integration — the way in which the system naturally combats the fragmentation of specialisation. If LRW faculty are seen as teachers of technical skills only, our very specialisation may prevent us from being fully integrated with our faculty colleagues.

The ultimate professional goal, of course, is for LRW teachers to take their rightful places as fully valued members of the academy. If many of us decided to try teaching the law we love to enhance our career, and consequently many LRW careers were enhanced, the whole field could move that much close toward this important goal.


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