LEGAL WRITING

Legal Writing marks the beginning of a law student’s professional apprenticeship. In this year-long, required course, first-year students learn the skills that lawyers need to practice law – the research skills to find the law applicable to a problem, the analysis skills to solve the problem, and the writing and oral advocacy skills to present those solutions to a client, another attorney, or a judge.

Penn’s Legal Writing Program is directed by Anne Kringel, a Yale Law graduate who has focused her academic work on legal research and writing since leaving practice and clinical teaching to join Penn in 1994. Legal Writing is taught in small sections by Legal Writing Instructors, talented third-year students who are selected through a competitive process. The class meets once a week, but students also meet individually with their instructors throughout the year. Because the classes are so small, the instructors can give a great deal of individual attention to their students.

Legal research is taught by Penn’s law librarians, who hold degrees in both law and library science. During research workshops, students follow the librarians through examples of computerized research problems on their own laptops. The workshops are followed by small group tutorials in the library, where students learn about print resources. Every session, whether on the computer or in the library, ends with a research exercise that allows students to test their newfound knowledge.

After acquiring skills through a series of research exercises and increasingly complex writing assignments, students use those skills to solve problems for simulated clients. They learn to create some of the most important documents that attorneys use to communicate: letters to clients, memoranda to other lawyers, and briefs to judges. Most of the learning in the course happens outside the classroom as students work in the role of attorneys, writing and rewriting these documents.

The culmination of the first term is a large research problem. Students must bring to bear all the research skills they have learned during the semester and write a memorandum to a senior attorney, laying out the applicable law and using that law to support their conclusions about the problem’s likely outcome.

In the spring term, students learn persuasive writing techniques, write a motion brief addressed to a trial judge, and argue the motion to a panel of third-year students. The final assignment of the year is a brief to a mock court of appeals and an oral argument at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia before a panel of practicing lawyers. By the end of the year, students should feel that they have reached a level of mastery of basic lawyering skills that will allow them to tackle whatever problems they encounter in their first legal jobs.