The biennial conference of the Association of Legal Writing Directors is taking place today and tomorrow at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. The planned sessions cover the waterfront, from development of programs, to the evolving roles of program directors, all the way to a technology track. Not surprisingly, my presentation on Saturday will be in the technology track - I will present on the subject of Law School 2.0 and share some of the work I have done with wikis in teaching.
I have been struck during the conference (so far) by how much we focus during these meetings on explaining to our students and colleagues what it is we do. I often find myself rather sick of these discussions, but today I am - reluctantly - appreciating the need for it. In some senses, explaining what we do should be simple. We help students to write legal documents. But for a number of reasons, it seems to me, it is actually not a simple thing to explain.
Some of our colleagues, unfortunately, still think we teach grammar and punctuation. That is, they think we are technicians, rather than rhetoricians. Of course we do teach a certain kind of writing, but so much more of what we do is teach thinking - or more precisely, legal thinking and legal expression. Some have called this applied analysis. Indeed, there is such a need for us to focus on applied analysis, there is very little time to teach grammar and legal citation.
In addition, over the last 15 years, a rich and diverse body of scholarship about the substance and pedagogy of applied analysis has enriched our field immeasurably, and it is an impressive body of work. Scholarship, of course, is very important to our colleagues. Helping them to understand the richness of our scholarship is something we need to do better.
But this is also a good time for those of us who teach applied analysis. The various criticisms of legal education all generally agree that our students need more "doctrine in context" - or, put another way, applied learning. In the context of the legal problems we teach with - yes, we teach doctrinal law too - and in the simulated environment in which most of us teach, we are (and have been for many years) doing what the criticisms say we need more of in legal education.
And so we still have an educational mission with our colleagues in the academy. It is easy to forget this when we are busy with our students. But we can't forget it.
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