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