Ph.: 505-277-7813
Fax: 505-277-1597
Office: 1121
Emeritus Professor of Law
Flickinger Award for Faculty Excellence
B.A. 1971, J.D. 1980, Wayne State University
Member of the Michigan and New Mexico Bars
Barbara Blumenfeld joined the UNM law faculty in 1995 to lead the school's legal writing program. As director, she designs materials for the first-year Legal Reasoning, Research and Writing and Advocacy courses. She established the New Mexico Court of Appeals Annual Appellate Advocacy Tournament for first-year students. Judges for the competition include members of the New Mexico Court of Appeals.
Blumenfeld also helps second- and third-year students prepare and write research papers. She diagnoses student writing problems and designs special programs and works with students who need remedial assistance in that area. From 1996 - 2003, she served as director of the law school's Pre-Enrollment Preparatory Program and developed the curriculum for the summer program. She has also taught in the PLSI Program.
In her teaching, Blumenfeld builds methodically on the basics, with the goal that at the end of the first year, students will have the writing skills necessary to successfully perform in summer clerkship jobs. She concentrates on thinking and reasoning skills, with the belief that good writing naturally flows from good thinking. She also encourages students to become self-critical writers and retain their own writing style within the confinements of composing a legal document.
Blumenfeld came to the UNM law school from Wayne State University Law School where, for eight years, she taught basic and advanced legal writing and analysis. She also designed many teaching materials that are now used by a number of other law schools.
Her interest in legal writing began as a law student at Wayne State University, where she was associate editor of the Wayne Law Review, and continued into a five-year practice focusing on trial and appellate work. She then joined the faculty at her alma mater.
The Electronic Authors Press honored her with an award for innovative teaching materials in the legal writing field.
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.
Prerequisite: C or better in LRRW.
The second semester Advocacy course continues the study and practice of legal writing that was begun in LRRW. Students learn to translate the skills they used in LRRW and in writing predictive documents into a basis for creating effective persuasive documents. Focus is on argumentation and rhetoric as the means to building strong and persuasive documents. In the context of writing documents that advocate a particular result for a specific client, students continue to practice the process of legal writing as they research, analyze, organize, write and revise litigation related documents. The primary context for the work done in Advocacy involves writing briefs to a specific court. In addition to writing complete briefs, students will complete several smaller assignments focusing on specific skills related to persuasive writing. Advocacy students will also be introduced to the role of ADR in client representation and will begin to learn about court and ethical rules related to brief writing. They will also have the opportunity to evaluate arguments written by others.
LRRW is the foundational legal analysis and communication course. In LRRW students learn how to use legal reasoning to predict the outcome of a legal problem. The focus is on the substance and reasoning that are key to effective legal communication. The course takes a problem solving approach to legal writing. Students learn to identify legal issues presented by specific cases. They are given an overview of collecting relevant information, including an introduction to legal research. Students learn how to connect this information as they analyze a legal problem in preparation for writing an advisory memo. Students learn how to determine relevant legal rules and apply those rules to specific facts to arrive at a reasonable conclusion in a specific case. Students practice organizing the information and their analysis into a logical and coherent structured proof of their conclusion and then effectively presenting the proof in a specific written format to a specific audience. Students also learn to perfect the mechanics of their documents as they learn techniques for effective revising and editing. Students learn that each step of the process is a foundation for the next step and therefore must be competently completed. Assignments include several short in class and out of class information gathering, pre-writing and writing exercises as well as completion of a complete memorandum of law. In addition, students are introduced to client communications and legal drafting.
An Introduction to Fact-Based Legal Analysis And Its Use In Preparing for Trial; The Theory of the Case and the Trial Notebook, Chapter Materials, Curso De Capacitación Para Capacitadores1ERConsurso Nacional De Juicios Orales (Training for Trainers, First National Oral Trial Competition) Mexico City, Mexico, January, 2005.
Materials for PLSI Advocacy (Textbook for summer program for Native American law students).
Legal Research, Reasoning, Writing (Textbook for first semester writing course at UNM)(1995, Revised ed. 2000).
Advocacy (Textbook for second semester writing course at UNM) (1995, revised ed. 1999).
Rhetoric, Referential Communication, and the Novice Writer, 9 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JALWD 207, Fall 2012.
Teaching Thinking and the Legal Creative Process, The Law Teacher, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall 2011
Legal Writing is a Creative Endeavor, New Mexico Lawyer, Vol. 6, No. 3 (August 2011) 8-11.
Can Havruta Style Learning Be a Best Practice in Law School?, 18 Willamette J. Int'l L. & Disp. Resol. 109 (2010)
Integrating Indian Law into a First Year Legal Writing Course, 37 Tulsa L. Rev. 503 (Winter 2001).
A Photographer's Guide to Legal Writing, Perspectives, Jan. 1996.
Why IRAC Should Be IGPAC, Second Draft, Fall 1995.
Write On! A Column on Legal Writing for the Practitioner, N.M. Verdict, 1995-1996 (monthly column).
Freedom of the Press & A Reporter's Ability to Gather News, 26 Wayne L. Rev. 75 (1979).
Workers' Compensation Insurance Carrier as Third Party Tortfeasor, 25 Wayne L. Rev. 1165 (1979).
Engaging Students With Havruta Style Learning, Presentation to Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, Summer Conference on Engaging and Assessing Students, June, 2011.
Using a Montana Problem as a Basis for Writing Assignments - Materials for Panel Discussion, Teaching the Third Sovereign: How and Why to Include Tribal Nations and Courts in Legal Writing Courses, 14th Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute 2010 Biennial Conference, June, 2010
An Alternate Approach to Case Briefing - A System of Becauses, Presentation to Ninth Annual Rocky Mountain Legal Writing conference, Tempe, Arizona, March 2009.
The Three Rs of Revision, Presentation to Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference, Phoenix, AZ, March 2002.
Panel Member, Incorporating Indian Law Into Other Law School Courses, AALS Annual Meeting, Jan. 4, 2002, New Orleans, LA.
Using IGPAC instead of IRAC as an Organizational Tool, Presentation to Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference, March 2001.
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