Professors Share Scholarship, Expertise at 2024 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute

Seven Brooklyn Law School professors participated in the 2024 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), serving as panelists, presenters, discussion group participants, and conference planners at the four-day event which wrapped up on Saturday and was held at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. 

The conference theme, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” was designed to look ahead with cautious optimism, exploring the myriad ways that legal writing professors and their students can flourish into the future. Brooklyn Law School’s prestigious Legal Writing Program, which is routinely recognized as one of the top 30 programs in the nation, had a robust faculty presence at this year’s conference.  

The first to participate was Professor Alberto Rodriguez, who joined a July 17 panel discussion titled “No One Writes Memos Anymore! Testing the Claim and Its Implications for Teaching.” He explained that attorneys do still write legal memos, but they are becoming a much less common assignment, and that legal practitioners reported that cost, time, and client preferences are major considerations for this change. In addition, attorneys are being asked to provide condensed legal analysis in an electronic format instead of writing formal memos. Practitioners also want newer attorneys to spend their time working on actual work products, such as brief-drafting and contract-drafting, rather than writing up a legal analysis, he said.  

Professor Alba Morales, who joined Brooklyn Law School on July 1, participated in a discussion later that same afternoon titled “The Challenges and Rewards of Teaching Legal Writing to First-Gen Law Students.” The discussion addressed an array of topics including various ways of defining “FirstGen;” identifying first-generation students; teaching the “hidden curriculum;” improving how we address the needs of first-generation law students; and the rewards of teaching first-generation students, according to Morales. 

Professor and Co-Director of Legal Research and Writing Maria Termini led a session titled “Negation in Legal Narratives” on July 18. Negation, which refers to the use of words such as “not” and “no,” highlights the absence or lack of something. Since a narrative is a story or an account of something that happened, it is not obvious that a narrative would include negation, which indicates that something did not happen. Yet scholars have identified various purposes of negation in narrative texts, including to provide background information, to deny expectations, and to mark critical moments in the narrative, Termini said.  

Professors Elizabeth Chen, Joy Kanwar, and Irene Ten Cate were participants in the “Scholarly Identity” discussion group, also on July 18. Among other subjects, they discussed how they themselves formed and currently define their scholarly identities; how engaging in scholarship impacts other aspects of a professor’s identity such as teaching and service; and the scholarly identity of legal writing as an academic discipline. 

Separately, Ten Cate gave a presentation that same day on “Writing About Legal Writing” in which she provided taxonomies of legal writing based on subject area and genre. She also discussed the writing process and common shortcomings in articles, essays, and book reviews. Lastly, she led a discussion about reasons to write and publish and the importance of finding and maintaining intrinsic motivation. 

Professor Alissa Bauer gave a “flash” presentation, similar in style to a TED Talk, titled “The Power of Parentheticals” on July 19. In it she discussed how students can use parentheticals to bolster their legal analysis and how legal writing teachers can introduce that concept in their classrooms. Specifically, she discussed explanatory parentheticals. After a Bluebook citation of a case or other source, a student or a lawyer can add additional information into a set of parentheses, and Bauer discussed the rules on how to do that.  

Brooklyn Law had a presence at the conference in other ways too. Kanwar celebrated the release this summer of the 8th Edition of Writing and Analysis in the Law, an influential legal writing textbook that she co-authored with Helene Shapo, Professor Emerita at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Professor Elizabeth Fajans, who recently retired from Brooklyn Law School. Kanwar was also recognized for her work as a member of the Site Committee for the Conference. 

Professor Emerita Marilyn Walter, who died in 2018 and was on the faculty of Brooklyn Law School for 38 years, including as the school’s longtime director of legal writing, was included in a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the LWI Biennial Conference. Walter, along with other founding members of LWI, was featured in a presentation by Laurel Oates, professor emerita at Seattle University School of Law, about the first conference and the origins of LWI.