These past two weeks, I have been grading my Year Two Legal Analysis take-home examinations. The exam is a legal writing exercise testing persuasive writing ability. The students wrote a stakeholder report for Amnesty International in the Universal Periodic Review of the United States of America. Students drafted a section of the report arguing that […]
Category: Lawyering
Collaborative Learning in Legal Skills
Group work, cooperative classrooms and collaborative learning. These phrases describe learning environments where students carry out some or all of their coursework in groups with their peers. While there is a difference in the focus of cooperative learning and collaborative group approaches to coursework, this post will not outline those differences, but merely advise readers […]
Legal Advising: Use mind maps to generate options
The emphasis on competence-based learning in today’s law school curriculum has enriched experiential courses and clinical programs for law students. My law school has designed its curriculum in first and second year to reinforce four competences: legal analysis, legal advising, legal representation and decision-making. Admittedly, some lecturers struggle to differentiate advising from representing. That […]
Three Steps for Essay and Short Answer Exam Prompts
Every law exam has an essay prompt and/or a short answer section. First year students sometimes struggle with what to write for their exam essay. Often, the written law school exam responses contain information and discussions that are not pertinent to what is asked in the prompt. Here is a three-step exercise for answering essays […]
Peer Feedback in Oral Advocacy
Legal writing professionals have been touting the benefits of peer review in their legal scholarship. Kirsten Davis wrote back in 2003 that “[b]y introducing peer editors into the writing process and allowing students the chance to see how other students approach the same legal problem, however, the peer review experience can teach students […]