NEWS RELEASE                             TJSL's  Legal Writing Program
April 3, 2007
Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s Legal Writing Program
Ranked in Top 30 by U.S. News & World Report

San Diego, CA -- For the second time in a two year span, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s Legal Writing Program among the top legal writing programs in the nation. The ranking is based on a survey of randomly selected legal writing professors nationwide.

The annual rankings, released on Friday, March 30, showed Thomas Jefferson at 26th place, along with Georgetown, Marquette and William Mitchell. Just two years ago in 2005, Thomas Jefferson’s Legal Writing Program was ranked 16th in the nation in the first-ever survey of legal writing programs by U.S. News & World Report.

"We are delighted once again by this recognition, especially because the voters whose opinion is reflected in the U.S. News specialty rankings are faculty members with recognized knowledge and experience in a particular field,” said Thomas Jefferson Professor Linda Berger, who has been instrumental in shaping Thomas Jefferson’s Legal Writing Program since it began in 1993.

“We think the recognition is based on Thomas Jefferson's commitment to building a professional community of scholars and teachers who are committed to the process of educating productive and effective lawyers."

Professor Berger maintains a high profile in legal writing circles as chair of the Editorial Committee of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and as editor of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors.

Thomas Jefferson Professor Ben Templin is serving as Chair of the Legal Writing Institute’s Scholarship Committee and several Thomas Jefferson professors gave presentations at last year’s national legal writing conference.

Thomas Jefferson Dean Rudy Hasl has been highly supportive of outreach efforts to the national legal writing community. Other Thomas Jefferson Legal Writing Program Professors who deserve recognition for this year’s high ranking include: Steve Berenson, Ilene Durst, Linda Keller, Jinsook Ohta, Sandra Rierson, Neill Tseng and Claire Wright.

Thomas Jefferson’s Legal Writing Program was one of the first in the country to be taught primarily by tenured and tenure-track faculty members and to draw extensively on thinking, learning, writing and teaching methods from other disciplines. Today, the program incorporates the best practices from benchmark legal writing programs, learning and teaching experts and fields including rhetoric, composition, literature, education and psychology.

For students, this means they will engage in solving increasingly complex legal problems as they are introduced to and then begin to master the essential lawyering skills of analysis: reasoning by induction, deductions and analogy; research; and written and oral communication and persuasion.

“The legal writing faculty are like translators or guides to a new world,” said Professor Ilene Durst, who has taught in the Legal Writing Program since 1994. “It’s very uncomfortable for a new student to arrive at law school and then find that the style and method of analysis employed is so different from what they’ve known. We try to provide a guide on how to get along in this new language and culture.”

The first year of the curriculum, consisting of Legal Writing I and Legal Writing II, is taught by a team of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members and augmented by experienced practitioners. Students learn how to conduct legal research, to analyze and apply the law, to create and test arguments, to organize legal documents, and to draft and revise for an audience.

In the second and third years of study, students are required to complete an upper level writing project either through a doctrinal seminar or professional skills course, by working on a Moot Court brief or law review notes, or by completing an independent study project under the supervision of a full-time faculty member. Students may further develop their lawyering skills by taking an advanced legal research course or a course designed to improve rhetorical skills.

The program recognizes that Thomas Jefferson graduates will play diverse roles as they practice different kinds of law. Because Thomas Jefferson’s legal writing faculty includes teachers who have become expert in a number of fields, they are especially qualified to help students begin to construct a foundation for their own practice of law.

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