Advanced Legal Writing (Persuasive Writing)

This course is for those students who want to refine their basic persuasive writing skills and become more sophisticated in writing persuasive legal documents. The course assumes a solid grasp of the basic skills taught in LRRW and Advocacy; those skills will not be directly addressed in this course. Students will, however, be expected to use those basic skills competently within the context of this course.

The class will generally address identifying, building and then writing legal arguments. While the focus is primarily on arguments written for briefs, discussion will include how to adapt basic argumentation techniques to other documents for both legal and non-legal audiences.

Class will take the form of a hands-on workshop and will generally include one or more of the following:

• Discussion and evaluation of actual briefs that have been filed with the courts;
• Discussion of assignment due in class involving continuing "out-of-class case file" and based on prior week’s class topics;
• Discussion of reading and short exercises due in class that involve current class topics;
• Use of continuing "in-class problem" to illustrate and practice class topics;
• Other in-class writing.

By the end of the course students will have written a complete trial-level brief based on the "out-of-class" case file and will have written two in-class briefs.