Areas of Study
Legal Writing
What is your philosophy in teaching legal writing?
"One thing I try to do in my teaching is to raise students' consciousness about their readers. I think lots of law students think that their readers will be omniscient – that judges know everything, and so you don't need to do much explaining. Judges have a good grounding in the law, but many judges have jurisdiction over a wide variety of cases, and they need lawyers who are good writers who can take complicated information and present it clearly.
This is something that I try to do in my teaching. I try to make the process of written legal analysis more simple by using various formulas – formulas that describe how to organize units of legal analysis, how to write topic sentences, how to describe cases, how to send signals to your reader, and so on. What a formula really does in this context is break the bigger task into smaller tasks – each piece of the formula is a separate task. Just as important, the formula gives you vocabulary you can use to talk about each of these smaller tasks."
Mary Beth Beazley
Associate Professor of Law
Faculty
At Moritz, Legal Writing and Analysis is traditionally taught by tenure-track faculty members on a rotating basis. Teaching the course in 2008-09 are:
Mary Beth Beazley
Associate Professor of Law; Director of Legal Writing
Michael Braunstein
Professor of Law
Sharon L. Davies
John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Designated Professor of Law
Steven F. Huefner
Professor of Law; Director of Clinical Programs; Legislation Clinic Director; Senior Fellow, Election Law @ Moritz
Edward Lee
Professor of Law
Melanie Oberlin
Reference Librarian
Paul Rose
Assistant Professor of Law
Monte Smith
Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
Marc Spindelman
Professor of Law
Charles E. Wilson
Associate Professor of Law


