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Legal Research & Writing Program James E. Beasley School of Law |
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| Real World Real Law Instruction in modern law schools is founded on the notion of teaching each student to think like an attorney. The Legal Research and Writing Program at Temple is one of the most intensive and advanced programs of its kind in the country, teaching students to develop and polish the skills that lawyers require most. |
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| A Tradition of Excellence | ||||
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Temple’s Legal Research and Writing Program serves as a model for many other law schools, reflecting the state-of-the-art in curricular design. First-year classes are intimate, ranging from 10 to 33 students, personalizing the learning experience for aspiring attorneys. Student assignments integrate legal writing with research, using both traditional and electronic sources, and classes are taught in new laptop-friendly classrooms. Specialized high-tech legal writing sections are also offered. | ||||
| A Dedicated and Diverse Faculty | ||||
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The Legal Research and Writing Program courses are taught by an outstanding group of teacher-scholars who are committed to excellence in the study of law. Their breadth of experience, in virtually every area of practice, is reflected in the program’s instructional techniques and guidance for students. The faculty also teach doctrinal courses and advanced legal writing courses, including Advanced Appellate Advocacy, Civil Pre-Trial Litigation Drafting, and Statutory Drafting. The program is directed by a full-time tenured member of the faculty, with a core of four full-time experienced writing professors. Other teachers in the program include adjunct professors engaged in full-time law practice, as well as experienced lawyers pursuing LL.M. degrees in the Abraham L. Freedman Fellowship Program, a unique two-year LL.M. program that prepares experienced lawyers for teaching. | ||||
| Hands-On Experience | ||||
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The Legal Research and Writing Program’s faculty view writing as a process of drafting and supervised revision. Students are guided in developing new skills while simultaneously practicing previously acquired skills in increasingly difficult contexts. The year-long program is intense, and is graded on the same basis as other law school courses. The faculty provide detailed critiques of the students’ memoranda and appellate briefs, meet several times with each student for individual conferences, and require supervised rewrites of major projects. The first-year courses conclude with appellate Moot Court exercises, when experienced Philadelphia-area lawyers and judges join the Legal Research and Writing faculty as judges of the students’ first efforts at oral advocacy. All the assignments incorporated in the program provide faculty and students with multiple opportunities to address related aspects of professionalism involving a lawyer’s role in conducting research and preparing documents, as well as in communicating ideas and positions via oral presentations. To further develop essential writing skills, students are required to take two upper-level writing courses, one involving a major research paper and the other a series of short pieces. |
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| Award Winning Results | ||||
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Temple students have excelled in law school writing competitions, winning all three top awards in the 2004 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Writing Competition, and first and second place in the 2003 competition. The quality of writing instruction at Temple has also been reflected in our students’ success in Moot Court competitions, their work on our four student-edited law journals, and their bar passage rate. The ability of Temple students and graduates to do high-quality legal research and writing contributes to the Law School’s job placement rates, which are among the best of all the law schools in the country, leading to successful employment in large corporate law firms, prestigious judicial clerkships, and public interest fellowships.
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| Legal Research & Writing Scholarship | ||||
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Temple’s faculty are leaders in the field of legal writing. They have offered numerous presentations at national and regional conferences, and their scholarly production about legal research and writing is unparalleled. Here is a sample of the legal writing scholarship produced by Temple’s faculty: Elena Margolis, Closing the Floodgates: Making Persuasive Policy Arguments in Appellate Briefs, 62 Mont. L. Rev. 60 (2001); Beyond Brandeis: Exploring the Uses of Non-Legal Materials in Appellate Briefs, 34 U.S.F. L. Rev. 197 (2000); Teaching Students to Make Effective Policy Arguments in Appellate Briefs, in 9 Perspectives 73 (2001) Susan L. DeJarnatt, In Re MacCrate: Using Consumer Bankruptcy as a Context for Learning in Advanced Legal Writing, 50 J. Leg. Educ. 50 (2000); Law Talk: Speaking, Writing, and Entering the Discourse of Law, 40 Duq. L. Rev. 489 (2002); The Philadelphia Story: The Rhetoric of School Reform, 72 U.M.K.C. L. Rev. 949 (2004) Bonny Tavares, The Expedited Appeals Process for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, 4 J. App. Prac. & Process 201 (2002) Jan M. Levine and Kathryn M. Stanchi, Writing, Women, & Wages: Breaking the Last Taboo, 7 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 551 (2001); Gender and Legal Writing: Law Schools’ Dirty Little Secrets, 16 Berkeley Women’s L. J. 3 (2001) Jan M. Levine and Kathryn M. Stanchi Writing, Women, & Wages: Breaking the Last Taboo, 7 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 551 (2001); Gender and Legal Writing: Law Schools’ Dirty Little Secrets, 16 Berkeley Women’s L. J. 3 (2001) Jan M. Levine, Legal Research and Writing: What Schools Are Doing, and Who is Doing the Teaching, 7 Scribes J. Leg. Writing 51 (2000); Leveling the Hill of Sisyphus: Becoming a Professor of Legal Writing, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 1067 (1999) Kathryn M. Stanchi, Exploring the Language of Law Teaching: A Feminist Process, 34 John Marshall L. Rev. 193 (2000); Feminist Legal Writing, 39 San Diego L. Rev. 387 (2002); Resistance is Futile: How Legal Writing Pedagogy Contributes to the Law’s Marginalization of Outsider Voices, 103 Dick. L. Rev. 7 (Fall 1998) |
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| Faculty Profiles | ||||
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Associate Professor Jan M. Levine,Director of Temple’s Legal Research and Writing program since 1996, was the founding President of the Association of Legal Writing Directors and has served for many years as a board member of the organization. He has been the Chairperson and member of the Committee on Communication Skills of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, a member of the board of directors of the Legal Writing Institute, and a board member for SCRIBES, the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects. Professor Levine has written more than a dozen articles and books about legal research and writing programs. He began his teaching of legal writing as an adjunct at his alma mater, the Boston University School of Law (J.D., 1978). Professor Levine practiced law for eight years, as counsel and trial lawyer for two Massachusetts state agencies, and staff attorney at the B.U. Center for Law and Health Sciences. His practice was in the areas of juvenile law, health law, disability law, and elder law. Associate Professor Kathryn M. Stanchi specializes in legal issues related to the intersection of writing, persuasion, and gender.She has published numerous articles on writing, advocacy, and feminism, and was the associate editor of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Evidence. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Legal Writing. Prior to teaching, Professor Stanchi was an associate in the litigation department of Debevoise & Plimpton and clerked for Justice Stewart G. Pollock of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Professor Stanchi graduated from Boston University Law School, magna cum laude, where she served on the law review. Associate Professor Susan L. DeJarnatt has eleven years of practice experience as a legal services lawyer in Philadelphia. Her scholarship builds on her public interest law background and her interest in rhetoric and composition theory. She has written about the rhetoric of consumer bankruptcy and public education reform movements. Before joining the Temple faculty in 1996, she taught at Rutgers-Camden School of Law and was a consumer bankruptcy specialist for Community Legal Services, Inc. She was an associate at Litvin,Blumberg, Matusow, and Young following her clerkship with the Honorable Joseph S. Lord, III,Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Professor DeJarnatt graduated first in her class from Temple Law School. Associate Professor Elena Margolis is an expert on appellate brief writing and advocacy. Her scholarship has been called “ground-breaking” and is widely cited in legal writing textbooks,law review articles, and appellate briefs. Before joining the Temple faculty in 1996, she taught at Vermont Law School, where she was Assistant Director of the Legal Writing Program. She also had a prestigious Skadden Fellowship to practice public interest law at Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services. Professor Margolis graduated from Northeastern Law School. Assistant Professor Bonny Tavares received her law degree from Howard University School of Law (J.D., 1993), where she was a member of the National Moot Court Team and the Howard Law Journal. Following law school, Professor Tavares served as an Attorney Advisor for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and specialized in labor and employment litigation. Professor Tavares joined Temple’s faculty in 2004. |
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| For more information, contact Jan M. Levine, Director, Legal Research and Writing Program at the Beasley School of Law at 215 204 8890 or jan.levine@temple.edu. |
