June 07, 2005
Legal Writing at Thomas Jefferson School of Law
In 2005, Thomas Jefferson's legal writing program was ranked 16th in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's first-ever survey of legal writing programs. When the program began in 1993, it 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 best practices from benchmark legal writing programs, learning and teaching experts, and fields including rhetoric, composition, literature, education, and psychology. For students, this means that 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, deduction, and analogy; research; and written and oral communication and persuasion.
The first year of the curriculum is taught by a team of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members augmented by a group of experienced practitioners. The full-time faculty members have varied teaching backgrounds, extensive law practice experience, and diverse scholarly interests ranging from literary and rhetorical theory to world trade regulation and tax policy.
The school's commitment to hiring full-time tenure-track faculty members to teach legal writing has added continuity, richness, and depth to their teaching. It allows professors to develop their scholarship interests as well as to bring into the classroom their deepening experience and understanding of the teaching and the practice of legal writing.
The legal writing curriculum at Thomas Jefferson is designed to help prepare graduates to become accomplished and productive attorneys by equipping them with critical skills, acquainting them with social and ethical responsibilities, and introducing them to a range of practice settings. The program recognizes that Thomas Jefferson graduates will play diverse roles as they practice different kinds of law.
Because the legal writing faculty at Thomas Jefferson includes teachers who have become expert in a number of fields – through their practice, their teaching, and their scholarship – they are especially qualified to help students begin to construct a foundation for their own practice of law.
Steve Berenson, whose civil litigation background includes five years as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, publishes articles on topics including the professional role of attorneys, access to justice, and clinical legal education. Linda Berger, who practiced First Amendment law and general civil litigation, writes about legal composition, legal rhetoric, metaphor theory, and media law; she is a founder and the current editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, published by West.
Ilene Durst, who has extensive litigation and immigration law experience, focuses her scholarship on language and narrative theory and their applications to advocacy, immigration, and literary representations of the legal culture. Linda Keller, who served as a Fellow at the University of Miami Center for the Study of Human Rights, matches her teaching and scholarly interests by publishing in the area of international human rights law.
Sandy Rierson, formerly a partner practicing intellectual property law with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, pursues scholarship in legal history and women's history, intellectual property, and civil procedure. Ben Templin, whose law practice emphasized general corporate law for emerging technology companies, now focuses his research on corporate law and tax matters, especially those affecting technology companies. Claire Wright, formerly a partner at both the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie and the consulting firm of Ernst & Young, is an expert on World Trade Organization law and is pursuing scholarly interests in international trade, the WTO, U.S.-Mexico relations and human rights.