Legal Research and Writing
Leading the Way in Lega The Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication: The Third Year
The Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication celebrated its third anniversary this year. We continued pursuing our mission of studying the issues of legal communication and serving the needs of faculty, students, lawyers, and other legal professionals. This year, the Institute: ▸▸ Graduated another class of students from our extra-curricular enrichment program, the Advanced Legal Writing and Communication Skills Development Program. Read more about this program at stetson.edu/commdevelopmentprogram. ▸▸ Launched a service project, Legal Writing: Out of the Box Ideas Inside, an ever-growing collection of teaching ideas for legal writing faculty. Read more about this project on pages six and seven. ▸▸ Investigated questions about legal communication, including how law students read and how rhetorical criticism skills fit with professional training. Read more about our scholarship on pages four and five. ▸▸ Continued to bring legal communication education to a variety of audiences. Read more about our training programs at stetson.edu/commtraining.
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al Communication A Rigorous Legal Writing Curriculum: Our Commitment to Students
U.S. News and World Report ranks Stetson third in the nation for Legal Writing. Stetson’s Legal Writing curriculum includes seven required credits in the first year, and students have the option of taking a subject-focused Persuasive Legal Writing course in the second semester. Topics for focus sections have included Environmental Law, Elder Law, International Law, First Amendment Law, Social Justice Law, Law and Technology, Criminal Law, and Business Law. In Stetson’s Advanced Legal Writing curriculum, students can choose from courses ranging from Contract Drafting to Judicial Opinion Writing to a seminar focusing on rhetorical theory.
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Cameron Has Eyes for Legal Reading
Institute faculty member Catherine Cameron is using state-of-the-art eye tracking software to explore differences in how law students read legal opinions over the course of their education. By comparing the reading practices of entering students and upper-level law students, Cameron is researching whether there is a correlation between increased legal knowledge and how legal readers read. “By gathering this information, we hope to better understand how successful readers of law actually do it,” explains Cameron. “If we can discover trends in reading law documents, we can learn what to present and how to present it in order to become more persuasive legal writers.”
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Professor Catherine Cameron uses eye-tracking software to understand how law students read legal opinions.
Rhetorical Criticism as Essential Legal Skill? Yes!
Speaking at the 2016 Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Institute Director Kirsten Davis advocated for rhetorical criticism training in law school as a way to help students to fulfill their roles as public citizens. The Model Rules of Professional Conduct direct lawyers to pursue the public good in their role as “public citizen[s] with special responsibility for justice.” “The skills of rhetorical criticism can be the intellectual foundation for actions lawyers take as public citizens,” Davis said in her presentation. “When engaged in rhetorical criticism, one maintains a skeptical perspective, critically evaluates language, discerns and explains the meaning of symbols and their contexts, morally reasons about the value of symbolic choices in a text, draws upon his imaginative capacities to fully understand the symbol and its context, and crafts persuasive arguments about the social impacts of those meanings. Arguably, a lawyer cannot perform the role of public citizen without possessing these skills.” Read Davis’s complete remarks on SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2792437.
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Kirsten Davis introduces the Institute’s new project at the Legal Writing Institute Biennial Conference in July.
Teaching Legal Writing: Out of the Box Ideas Inside
A mission of the Institute is to improve the teaching of legal communication and to support the legal writing teaching community. The Institute’s newest project, Teaching Legal Writing: Out of the Box Ideas Inside, collects, organizes, and shares the legal writing community’s favorite classroom exercises and other teaching ideas. The project combines a physical box where legal writing faculty can explore legal writing teaching ideas by topic with an online, password-protected area that includes teaching materials that can be downloaded and customized. The project will be updated annually with new teaching materials. To join in the project and get teaching ideas, email SendMeTheBox@law.stetson.edu.
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Legal Writing Fac Leading, Writing, S ▸▸ Professor Linda Anderson presented “Rekindling the Flames – Surviving Burnout” at the 2016 Rocky Mountain Regional Legal Writing Conference. ▸▸ Professor and Institute Faculty Member Brooke Bowman is a member of the ABA Law Student Division Competition Committee and served as 2015-16 Chair of the ABA National Appellate Advocacy Competition Committee. Bowman also advises Stetson’s nationally recognized Moot Court program. Learn more at stetson.edu/mootcourt. ▸▸ Professor and Institute Director Kirsten Davis published a new legal writing mobile application, My Legal Writing™: The Four Techniques, a free iPad/iPhone mobile application about editing legal documents for easier reading and better comprehension. She also published an eBook edition of My Legal Writing™: Memos, available on iPad and Kindle. You can follow Davis on Twitter: @mylegwriting. ▸▸ Institute Faculty Members Catherine Cameron, Kirsten Davis, and Lance Long presented “Scholarship: Who Are We Now? Legal Writing Scholarship in Today’s Academy,” at the Biennial Legal Writing Institute Conference.
Lance N. Long, Professor of Legal Skills. 8
▸▸ Professor Kelly Feeley is the Institute’s newest Faculty Member. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the ABA Law Student Division Competition Committee, which oversees the ABA’s Arbitration, Client Counseling, Appellate Advocacy, and Negotiation Competitions.
ulty: peaking, Serving ▸▸ Professors Royal Gardner and Brooke Bowman co-directed the 20th Annual Stetson International Environmental Moot Court Competition, which has regional moots around the world. The competition was instrumental in Stetson receiving the ABA 2016 Distinguished Achievement Award in Environmental Law and Policy. Gardner also teaches the Environmental Law-focused Research and Writing course for first-year students. ▸▸ Professor and Institute Faculty Member Lance Long presented “Writing to Save the World” at the 2016 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. The workshop, grounded in Long’s research on effective legal communication, covered key persuasive writing techniques for environmental advocates. ▸▸ Professor Ann Piccard was appointed Co-Chair of Stetson’s Social Justice Advocacy Concentration Program. She also spoke at the SALT Teaching Conference this fall on Stetson’s approach to incorporating social justice teaching across the curriculum. Piccard teaches the Social Justice-focused Research and Writing course for first-year students.
Stephanie A. Vaughan, Associate Dean for Student Engagement and Professor of Legal Skills.
Kelly M. Feely, Professor of Legal Skills.
▸▸ Associate Dean for Student Engagement Stephanie Vaughan co-coached the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration team that competed in Vienna, Austria. The team won awards in every category and advanced to the top 32 of 311 teams representing 67 countries. Vaughan teaches Research and Writing.
▸▸ Professor Jason Palmer was a panelist on “Student Scholarly Writing” at the 2016 Southeast Regional Legal Writing Conference. He presented “Improving Self-Efficacy in Law Students Through Universal Design in Learning” at the 2015 ALWD Biennial Conference.
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Palmer Co-Chairs LWI Conference; Elected to LWI Board Professor and Institute Faculty Member Jason Palmer served as the Co-Chair for the 17th Biennial Legal Writing Institute Conference. The conference highlighted innovative and cutting-edge programming, with over 500 legal writing faculty attending. “Working on planning and implementing the LWI conference was a labor of love,” Palmer said. “The conference allows legal writing faculty to interact and learn from each other, socialize and catch up with friends and colleagues, and re-charge our collective batteries in a warm and supportive environment.” Palmer also was elected to the LWI Board of Directors for a four-year term. He notes that one of his core objectives as a board member is “to fight for inclusion of legal writing faculty as equal members in all facets of the legal academy.” Above, left: Jason Palmer, Professor of Legal Skills and Coordinator of Legal Research and Writing.
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Legal Communication Abroad: Investigations in London Kirsten Davis spent the fall of 2015 in London, England, as Academic Director of Stetson’s Autumn in London Study Abroad Program. While there, she taught both Professional Responsibility and Comparative Freedom of Expression, a seminar during which students wrote about different countries’ approaches to regulating various types of communication, including legal communication. In addition to teaching, Davis had the opportunity to visit with legal communication faculty at The City Law School and BPP University. “Writing for litigation in relation to oral advocacy is balanced differently in English courts,” said Davis. “Of particular interest to me was the ‘skeleton argument,’ a genre of written argument that is unfamiliar in the U.S. This experience opened my mind to the possibilities of other ways to advance legal argument that we may not yet teach in American law schools.” Inset photo: Davis with her students at the U.S. Embassy in London.
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Stetson University College of Law 1401 61st Street South Gulfport, Florida 33707 stetson.edu/legalcomm
Congratulations
to Institute Faculty Member Professor Brooke Bowman on her ten years of service as Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Legal Writing: Journal of the Legal Writing Institute. We are proud of your accomplishments!
Mark Your Calendar! 2017 Southeast Regional Legal Writing Conference and Stetson’s Law and Rhetoric Colloquium
April 21-22, 2017 Stetson University College of Law
Call for Proposals Coming Soon! Visit us at www.stetson.edu/legalcomm for more about the Institute.
NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE PAID ST PETE, FL PERMIT No. 50