Most students do all right with commas, periods, sentence fragments, and verb agreement. But what about colons, dashes, passive voice, and parallelism? This lesson covers several advanced topics in grammar and punctuation for the legal writer who is ready to move beyond the basics.
The purpose of this exercise is to help students—especially first-year students—understand the process of legal analysis and improve their legal writing and legal analysis skills. Specifically, students will work on their ability to apply the law to the facts of a problem.
This lesson introduces a modern approach to writing issue statements for traditional memos and briefs. The lesson steers users away from single-sentence issue statements. It bases much of its approach on the syllogism.
This lesson is designed to cover how to distinguish legally relevant facts, contextually relevant facts, and nonrelevant facts; plus, how to use each of those types of facts. It is also designed to cover beginning and organizing a statement of facts, writing facts briefly and readably, stating facts objectively, and stating facts persuasively.
This is one in a series of lessons directed at the ethical and professional considerations associated with the production of particular lawyering documents. This lesson is intended to introduce first year law students to the ethical and professional considerations associated with the preparation of predictive, interoffice memoranda. It is assumed that students are familiar with predictive, interoffice memoranda. No prior instruction in professional responsibility is required.
This is an exercise designed to introduce first-semester law and graduate students to the basic elements of a typical case "brief" and to teach them general methodology for writing their own briefs. The exercise consists of three parts: (1) an introduction to the purposes and uses of a case brief; (2) a detailed examination of each of the ten components of a typical case brief (with examples); and (3) two actual cases that students are asked to read and then to brief, using the methodology described in this exercise. A sample brief for each of the two cases is also provided, thereby allowing students to correct and modify their briefs by way of comparison.
A large percentage of litigation arising out of contracts results from poor drafting. In order to eliminate this litigation, it is imperative that students and legal professionals master good drafting skills. One of the most important aspects of drafting a contract is the operative language--language that affects legal relationships. This lesson is designed to introduce law students to operative language commonly used in drafting contracts, in particular, language of obligation (shall), language of authorization (may) and language of condition precedent (must).
Drafters of contracts, wills and statutes are plagued with the ambiguities inherent in the use of these two connectors. This lesson is designed to identify these ambiguities and then help students to draft with conjunctions which eliminate those ambiguities.
This exercise is to help users learn the rules of proper citation form for briefs and legal memoranda. It does not deal with proper citation form for law review footnotes. It is divided into three sections: Section A deals with cases, B with statutory materials and C with secondary authorities.
Plagiarism in today's online social media world is both confusing and serious, especially for students of the law. This lesson will explain what constitutes plagiarism, distinguish between copyright and plagiarism, and offer opportunities for students to test their understanding of plagiarism.