RETAINING CRITICAL THINKING: PREPARING FOR THE TRANSITION FROM TRADITIONAL LEGAL RESEARCH TO GENAI RESEARCH

STEPHANIE DER

            While learning and performing legal research, students not only gain proficiency in tasks like navigating secondary sources or locating annotations, but they also simultaneously practice a number of “ancillary skills” that have broader applicability, such as issue spotting and analogical reasoning. The advent of generative AI-powered legal research platforms like CoCounsel and Lexis+ AI (hereinafter “Legal GenAI”) promises to significantly reduce the amount of time lawyers and law students spend performing research.2 How, then, will students develop these ancillary skills? This essay encourages legal research and writing professors to identify the ancillary skills their students have been learning through traditional legal research instruction and to make intentional choices about whether and how to teach these skills as students transition to Legal GenAI research.

         This essay intentionally does not address two significant questions.First, it does not address whether legal research and writing professors should embrace Legal GenAI. It instead operates under the assumption Read full essay...

HERE WE ARE, NOW ENTERTAIN US: ONE (ELDER) MILLENNIAL’S THOUGHTS ON METHODS AND MEANS OF CONNECTING WITH GEN Z IN THE LEGAL WRITING CLASSROOM

JOSEPH HUMMEL

            Being an elder millennial somewhat close in age to many of my 1L students, the majority of whom qualify as Gen Z, I naturally assumed I would relate to and understand what they needed and wanted in legal education, and in the legal writing classroom, specifically. I was wrong. Gen Z members are unique, gifted, and complex—and in ways very different from my generation, or any generation before that. Who they are informs what they need, want, and expect in a legal education. It also informs how they prefer and need to learn. This presentation compiles research and information on Gen Z. It offers legal writing professors ideas for how to adapt teaching and assessments to effectively connect with Gen Z, all while maintaining substance in teaching fundamental legal writing skills. Read full essay...

PURPLE ZONES AND TRAFFIC CONES:NAVIGATING BLUEBOOK & REDBOOK OVERLAPS 

DEREK H. KIERNAN-JOHNSON

           The Bluebook is a legal citation manual.2 The Redbook is a legal “style” manual, aimed at “the stuff that comes in between citations . . . sentences and their relationship to the authorities cited.”3 That distinction seems clear. Yet citation and style manuals drift into one another’s lanes and even drive squarely though them. These overlapscreate “purple zones,” where both a Bluebook rule and a Redbook rule apply. One can embrace a purple zone, by following a Bluebook rule that applies to text or a Redbook rule aimed at citations, or keep the manuals’ domains distinct, by cordoning off the overlap with traffic cones.These overlaps have concrete consequences. Students graded on “Bluebook compliance” might want to know which Bluebook rules governing text they should follow when citation rules conflict with Redbook rules. So too with competitors in writing competitions and those tasked with scoring their submissions. Lawyers faced with court rules recommending the Redbook or requiring them to “follow the Bluebook”face similar dilemmas. Read full essay...

FIRST STEPS: USING QUESTIONS TO SCAFFOLD STUDENTS’ APPROACH TO COUNTER ARGUMENTS IN PERSUASIVE LEGAL WRITING

HEATHER M. KOLINSKY

            Scaffolding as a Teaching Tool in Legal Writing Scaffolding is an educational tool that allows a professor to take parts of a complex process and create a bridge from one part of the process to the next in a form that does not entirely divorce it from the whole.2 The most obvious example is a closed universe memo where the cases have been provided to the students, taking the research step out of the process but still requiring students to evaluate and engage in analysis of the cases provided. But scaffolding can also take the form of hints, prompts, thinking aloud, feedback, cue cards, checklists, or asking leading questions.3

            Scaffolding was an outgrowth of Lev Vygotsky’s concept of a zoneof proximal development in learning.4 This zone lies between a zone of tasks novice learners can master on their own and a zone beyond their capabilities. Read full essay...

TEACHING AROUND GENERATIVE AI PLAGIARISM RISKS

NANCY MARCUS

            Much has been written and said about generative AI’s potential uses and misuses by lawyers and law students in the past year. This essay does not rehash the many ongoing discourses about whether, how, and to what extent, generative AI (GenAI) can be used for and taught in legal writing courses. Rather, this essay is written under the assumption that, atleast to some extent early on in the law school experience, some professors don’t want 1L legal writing students using GenAI to draft legal memoranda and briefs for them. As the American Bar Association’sFormal Ethics Opinion 512 warns, it is important to develop human lawyerly intelligence first before engaging in and being able to assess artificial intelligence.”2 Despite the need for law students to develop that requisite lawyer intelligence required to meaningfully assess the value of any given AI-generated legal analysis, however, Lexis AI+ is now widely available to law students from their first month in school. That widespread access to GenAI may have its benefits, but not without also posing significant dangers of new AI-aided opportunities for plagiarism. Read full essay...

FROM PERIPHERAL TO PIVOTAL: THE ROLE OF LEGAL WRITING IN THE MODERN LAW SCHOOL MISSION

KARIN MIKA

            Legal Writing, once considered peripheral to a quality legal education, has evolved into one of the most important components of the law school curricula and legal education. However, the journey from the margins to the forefront of legal education has not been straightforward.Prior to the 1980s, most law schools did not offer organized Legal Writing programs, dismissing the subject as little more than remedial grammar instruction.2 This view diminished the role of Legal Writing and anyone who taught Legal Writing.

           Legal Writing teachers, who were mostly called “instructors”(rather than professors) were often relegated to low-paying, part-time positions without job security or status. 3 Because the field was dominated by females who were doing part-time, low paid labor, Legal Writing began to be known as the “pink ghetto”4 and not taken seriously by the legal academy.

            Law schools often “capped” the contracts of Legal Writing teachers so that those teaching Legal Writing had to find other employment aftertwo or three years.5 This did not enable the development of any level of professionalism because few programs could develop consistency. Read full essay...