Associate Professor of the Practice

Reflecting on the experience of faculty at Boston College Law School and Tashkent State University of Law in Uzbekistan during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, this essay discusses how law teachers can promote student engagement in remote learning by adapting classroom assessment techniques, or CATs, to the remote learning environment. Originally promoted in a 1988 book by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross as tools “to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it,” CATs are well-designed and well-tested in-class activities that require students to interact with the teacher and with content; thus, in addition to providing information about learning, CATs can be used as methods to engage students in learning. CATs adapt easily from the physical to the virtual classroom, which to many law teachers in the U.S. offers the promise of engaging students in a manner similar to the physical classroom. In light of drawbacks of the virtual classroom, however, U.S. law teachers may find instructive the experience of teachers at TSUL, who have devised ways to employ activities that function similarly to CATs in lower bandwidth contexts.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Herding CATS: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the U.S. and Uzbekistan

Writing Labs: Commenting on Student Work-In-Progress

Teaching Case Synthesis in Living Color

Why You Should Use a Course Web Page

As experts in the pedagogy and substance of legal writing, full-time legal writing faculty who serve as writing consultants to law firms help fill an increasing need for training and support of lawyers. In addition to providing a direct benefit to lawyers and their firms, this practice benefits the legal academy by providing fresh ideas for teaching and scholarship. This article discusses generally the practice of legal writing consulting in law firms by full-time legal writing faculty. The article provides background in theory and practice, addressing why law firms seek outside consultants for this type of training and support and why full time legal writing faculty are appropriate writing consultants. For this, the Article draws on, among other sources, the recently published Carnegie Study and Best Practices in Legal Education. The Article then describes the nuts and bolts of a consulting practice, including various ways services might be configured, and asks whether realistic goals can be set and met. Finally, the article addresses ethical and other challenging issues that may arise in this type of consulting practice.

Teaching in Practice: Legal Writing Faculty as Expert Writing Consultants to Law Firms

Becoming a successful legal writer is a process that begins in law school and continues intensively during the beginning years of a lawyer's career. Throughout this process, in both contexts, a writer benefits enormously from feedback on his analysis, and how that analysis is conveyed, from those more experienced. Much has been written about how legal educators should respond to student written work, yet little addresses the role that supervising attorneys can play in mentoring the writing of less experienced colleagues. This article therefore proposes a methodology to help supervisor-mentors provide, in an efficient manner, effective feedback on junior lawyers' writing. The article begins by discussing why a mentor should focus her feedback initially on the analytical foundation of a piece of writing and put off until later copy-editing and commenting on basic clarity of expression. It goes on to recommend a methodology by which a mentor can draw on her experience as a lawyer to identify, from the face of a document, a range of textual and structural clues that likely indicate analytical problems, even when time pressures prevent her from gaining an independent understanding of the document's substance. The article explains how, based on these clues, a mentor can provide feedback that will help a junior lawyer revise a current piece of writing and develop skills to write more successfully in the future. The article concludes by applying this methodology to a hypothetical problem to illustrate this process and to provide the reader with a hands-on practicum using the suggested methodology.

E. Joan Blum

Works

Herding CATS: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the U.S. and Uzbekistan

Writing Labs: Commenting on Student Work-In-Progress

Teaching Case Synthesis in Living Color

Why You Should Use a Course Web Page

Teaching in Practice: Legal Writing Faculty as Expert Writing Consultants to Law Firms

A Methodology for Mentoring Writing in Law Practice: Using Textual Clues to Provide Effective and Efficient Feedback

What Legal Employers Want...and Really Need: Report from a Conference at Boston College Law School

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Writing Labs: Commenting on Student Work-In-Progress

Teaching Case Synthesis in Living Color

Why You Should Use a Course Web Page

Teaching in Practice: Legal Writing Faculty as Expert Writing Consultants to Law Firms

A Methodology for Mentoring Writing in Law Practice: Using Textual Clues to Provide Effective and Efficient Feedback

What Legal Employers Want...and Really Need: Report from a Conference at Boston College Law School

Works