Course Overview

• This course is an undergraduate introduction to legal analysis and writing. It’s not a law-school-level course. The only prerequisite to the course is the completion of general-education writing. No specialized knowledge or experience is required to enroll in the course. If you have experience with legal writing, great. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.

• In this course, we will immerse ourselves in two highly realistic legal scenarios drawn from real cases. You will be placed in the role of associate attorneys in a law firm and asked to do some typical kinds of writing that lawyers do every day. Your firm, and your cases, will be in the fictional state of New Columbia. Having a fictional state allows me to adapt legal materials from any state.

• The situations in which you will write are realistic and based on common scenarios. The scenarios are fundamental, not esoteric, not based on the hot political issues of the day, and do not require specialized knowledge. Instead, they are adapted from real down-to-earth everyday legal matters from the recent past. This course offers an appropriate taste (adapted to undergraduates) of what real lawyers do when using writing—and every lawyer uses writing, all the time.

• Both scenarios involve civil litigation. While lawyers write to achieve all kinds of purposes, litigation scenarios are, in my view, the best way to introduce students to the basics of legal writing. Many of the other situations in which lawyers write might be related to litigation—including trying to prevent it. So, the course again takes a fundamental approach.

• Each project has a different audience, genre, and purpose. Lawyers have to be well-rounded writers, and you will get a taste of that here.

• All of your projects will require you to use factual and legal materials (which I will provide). This is not a legal research course. As is appropriate to a fundamental, undergraduate, open-pathway course, I will simply give you all the legal authorities and factual materials that you will need. You’ll work on understanding and using them, but not on having to find them. Do not bring in additional legal authorities beyond those assigned from the fictional state of New Columbia and stick to the assigned facts (plus reasonable inferences grounded in the facts).