At St. John’s, we strive to ensure that our students enter the
legal profession with the writing and research skills they need to
excel in practice. We teach first-year legal writing in small
sections of about twenty students, staffed by full-time legal
writing professors with excellent, practical legal experience and
outstanding academic credentials. We provide two credits of
Legal Analysis and Writing in the Fall semester, focusing on
objective writing. In the Spring, we provide two credits of Legal
Analysis, Research and Writing, which introduces students to both
research and persuasive writing skills.We offer a wide array of
upper-class writing electives and extra-curricular activities,
designed to help students master their general writing skills and
develop expertise in drafting documents for discrete practice
areas. Our writing program has been recognized by U.S. News
& World Report as one of the nation’s top writing
programs.
The Practice-Writing
Requirement
The faculty has expanded the upper-class Advanced Writing
Requirement to include a practice writing component. Now, in
addition to writing a scholarly paper, students must take at least
one course focused on the craft of writing for practice. In
these courses, students write, and their professors critique, the
kinds of documents they are likely to encounter in practice:
pleadings, motion papers, briefs, commercial contracts, wills,
trusts, leases, and the like. We offer many small sections of
practice-writing courses. Students may choose courses that develop
practice-writing skills generally or ones that focus on a specific
practice area, such as bankruptcy, real estate, trusts and estates,
appellate practice, or pre-trial litigation.
A Program on Scholarly Writing
for Students
Many students satisfy their scholarly writing requirement by
authoring a note or comment for a student-edited journal or a
research paper supervised by a faculty member. We have recently
added a program to enhance the quality of student scholarship. One
of our full-time legal writing professors works exclusively on the
program. In both the fall and spring semesters, the professor,
through a series of lectures and individual conferences, helps
students learn how to choose suitable topics for scholarship,
research them effectively, analyze them professionally, and write
about them clearly. Student journal editors and faculty members
with substantive expertise provide additional support. The program
reflects St. John’s commitment to produce student scholarship that
is that is focused, meaningful, and well written.
An Enhanced Moot Court Training Program
Moot court offers law students an excellent opportunity to learn
appellate practice, and at St. John’s we are determined to make the
most of that opportunity. Students invited to participate in moot
court attend a weekend “boot camp’ on appellate advocacy over the
summer, followed by a rigorous full-semester course in the fall
designed exclusively to train moot court students in the art of
appellate advocacy.
A Newly Constructed Writing Center
For years, first-year legal writing students have come to the law
school’s Writing Center to receive one-on-one tutoring from the
most accomplished upper-class student writers. Under the
supervision of Professors Margaret Turano and Robin Boyle, the
Writing Center Consultants have tutored hundreds of first-year
students by reviewing first-year assignments for basic principles
of grammar, organization, and legal citation form. In addition, the
Consultants provide critique of students' practice-exam essays. For
upper-level students, the Writing Center is the place to brainstorm
about ideas, edit scholarly pieces, submit papers to writing
competitions, find publication sources for articles, and polish
briefs and memoranda for use as writing samples. Now the Writing
Center has a spacious new location on the law school's first floor
where it can serve students more effectively.
Legal Writing: A Single Endeavor, a
Unified Faculty
St. John’s understands that thinking like a lawyer and
writing like one are symbiotic skills. Students in legal writing
class parse cases as well as sentences. They focus on analysis as
well as structure, rhetoric as well as syntax. And doctrinal
courses do not ignore writing. Introduction to Law, the students’
first class, blends legal method and legal writing, having students
apply theoretical principles to real-life situations in a series of
short, writing assignments. Moreover, many of our doctrinal
professors routinely teach writing courses or incorporate writing
into their courses
Faculty
A diverse and accomplished group, the legal writing faculty values
the latitude that the program offers them in structuring their
courses, and they thrive on the program’s collaborative spirit. The
brief summaries of their backgrounds and accomplishments listed
below provide a sense of who they are and why the program is well
respected and nationally recognized.