Georgiana wrote:run26.2 wrote:Graded LRW is a very good idea. It is arguably the most important class many students will take in law school, aside from a clinic.
I would agree if it weren't so skewed to litigation, especially appellate litigation, which a lot of us never use. If they're going to grade it like a real class, they need to treat it like a real class and have people who know what they're doing teach it (sorry 3Ls, I love you but you've never practiced and can't teach me what lawyers/judges want).
Writing classes are difficult to grade objectively because everyone has a different style, and in order to get a good grade, you conform your style to the teacher, not to some objective "good" writing. You'll do this in practice too. When you write for a partner you find out what the partner wants (bullets? paragraphs? emails? quotes from documents?), its about making it user friendly to the audience, and judges will make up a very small part of the audience for a LOT of graduates in their first several years.
And an anecdote, because I know people love anecdotes: I know someone who took LW at a school who graded it, it was his/her worst grade in all of law school, he/she went on to be EIC of their journal + had their comment published + did a clerkship. I can't say I agree that grades tell you much about your ability to write.
The first bolded statement is a legitimate critique of my argument, which I did consider. But I still think it is helpful outside of the context of litigation. I would guess transactional lawyers are writing memos to partners on a fairly regular basis.
In response to the second bolded statement, I differentiated between legal writing and academic writing. They are not the same thing and do not necessarily require the same strengths, even if they involve analogous skills. For instance, legal writing involves understanding the form of the product you are producing, which components to include, how to present those components, and a few other things.
You could say that academic writing also involves these same components, but the end is different. In legal writing, you are concerned with laying out all of those components to lead to the inescapable conclusion that your position is correct and your opponents position is incorrect. It is more subjective and normative. That isn't exactly what you are doing in academic writing. There, you are more descriptive and objective, even if you are driving at a particular point.
So some skills will be shared, but not all. And the only way you develop the skill of legal writing, IMO, is to practice. Admittedly, no legal writing program in law school will be perfect (and Penn's may not even be that good in relative terms), but at least it gets the students practicing.
ETA: To the clerkship point, most people don't get a clerkship on the strength of their writing. Most get one on the strength of their grades.
