Legal Writing - LAW 369

Legal Writing is an intensive writing lab that builds on the skills you acquired in your legal courses, using varied assignments from transactional, litigation, and legislative practice. In a supportive and collaborative classroom environment, you will learn about drafting statutes, contracts, complaints, answers, motions and nice motions, orders, interrogatories, general correspondence and opinion letters. You will also re-examine, and take to a higher level, aspects of the types of writing you did in your legal courses. For example, you will work on objective issue statements and persuasive questions presented, objective and persuasive fact statements, and the large-scale organization of the discussion sections of research memos and the argument sections of briefs.

This course is a bridge between the other legal courses, because it teaches the skills necessary to analyze legal issues in any area of law. Specifically, the course should help students improve the following skills:
- Analyzing and conceptualizing legal issues;
- Organizing strategies; structuring legal arguments and documents;
- Using core writing techniques, including clarity, cohesion, and concision;
- Writing strong introductions and conclusions;
- Mastering objective vs. persuasive techniques;
- Using new editing techniques; and
- Sharpening efficient writing and editing skills, using timed assignments.

Language of Instruction: English and Arabic.