LegWrit Notes
Short Description
Notes for Atty. Dake's LegWrit class...
Description
The process of developing a new area's language actually develops its substance. First, the academy must address status issues surrounding legal writing that have exacerbated delay in the process of developing a common vocabulary. Next, to solve the communication problem that legal writing jargon creates, scholars must study the state of the language used to teach legal writing now. It is critical to know how those creating a new legal writing languagelegal writing professors and their studentstalk about writing. The legal community must concomitantly identify how judges and lawyers talk about writing. If we begin to understand how legal professionals use jargon differently, we can see how we need to clarify our speech. Additionally, legal writing professionals should make considered decisions when expanding legal writing vocabulary, creating new terms or neologisms purposefully and not merely for the sake of expansion. Finally, after studying the emerging legal writing language, legal writing professionals can begin teaching the entire legal community the vocabulary needed to talk about legal writing with each other as colleagues, teachers, and employers. Lawyering is a craft at the center of which is communication. Creating jargon is essential to the development of the field's substance. New Rhetoric views language as constitutive: that is, the writing process does not simply reveal thought. It makes thought. In other words, in New Rhetoric theory, writing is thinkinga different way of thinking. a separate discipline before the 1980s The clinical education movement became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing skills and experiential training. 4 Law school clinics and externships offered students the opportunity to practice law under supervision while still in law school. As students represented actual clients, whether in the law school's clinic or in local law offices, they necessarily drafted legal memoranda, pleadings, motions, and even appellate briefs that were not just for learning purposes, but actually filed in courts. This experience may have reinforced law faculties' perceptions that students needed to study legal writing more formally prior to graduation. In the 1980s, the nature of law practice changed, exhibiting a new emphasis on business practices and the bottom line." In response to students' poor entry skills and the demands of the legal market, between 1985 and 1990, a trend developed where many law schools began offering more substantial legal writing programs. 4 Instruction in writing programs during this early period generally followed what composition theorists have labeled "the current traditional model" or a "formalist" approach.4 ' Formalism in legal writing emphasizes the product, especially the formal features of various documents that lawyers produce.42 Formalism also emphasizes clarity and accuracy "Instrumental writing" because it views writing as simply a tool for expressing thought, not forming thought The attempt to articulate a stepbystep guide to analytical organization fostered the creation of IRAC, and its variations. Professor Linda Edwards, for example, uses the term "umbrella section" to describe an introductory paragraph that states a thesis, Professor Sue Liemer uses the term "thesis section" to describe the introductory paragraph,55 and Professors Nancy L. Schultz and Louis J. Sirico, Jr. call the introductory paragraph a "road map paragraph."
During the late 1960s with an explosion of theory in English departments across the country, Rhetoric, and changes in thinking about rhetoric, have influenced legal writing teaching and legal writing's emerging language "Rhetoric" today may refer to classical rhetoricthe art and strategies of persuasion based on the work of ancient Greeks. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, invention received little attention from rhetoricians, who saw the rhetorical function as reporting objectively, rather than interpreting. "Current traditional paradigm" By the midtwentieth century, however, the view changed. In the modern sense, "rhetoric" may also refer to "the use of symbols to construct alternative meaning frames. 1960s, however, HansGeorg Gadamer introduced a new view of hermeneutics, which abandoned the search for objective meaning in favor of interpretation that was contextualized to the interaction between a particular reader and the text. During the writing process, "reading and writing comprise a series of transactions between reader and writer, reality and language, prior texts and this text, the individual and the context." New Rhetoric was only the first in a series of new theories developed in composition studies during the last thirty years, but legal writing scholarship generally uses the term "New Rhetoric" to delineate them all. Legal dispute – Legal right Importance of principal issue – a case will be decided for and against you based on that issue Prework is a process Precise language Block code – no need for quotations
View more...
Comments