Title

Teaching Legal Research and Writing with Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education into the First Year

Abstract

In this article, we advocate using actual legal work to teach legal research and writing courses, including first year courses. By “actual legal work,” we mean work that is part of an ongoing or planned lawsuit, transaction, negotiation or other form of legal representation. We offer an overview and critique of the traditional legal writing curriculum, and we describe our initiatives to build upon and enhance that curriculum with the use of actual legal work. We conclude with some thoughts on the relative merits of our approach and ideas for following our model.

Disciplines

Legal Education

Date of this Version

September 2005