Those who teach
first-year J.D. students know that it can be challenging to teach them to
support their legal arguments by working with the facts in the detailed way
that U.S. legal audiences expect. Indeed, it can be even more challenging to
teach this skill to our international law students. These students usually come
from civil-law legal systems in which cases do not have binding precedential
value, so judicial opinions do not need to be made factually consistent with
precedent to the extent required in the U.S. Accordingly, many international
lawyers are not accustomed to working with the facts at a detailed, concrete
level, and find our need to analogize our facts to, and distinguish them from,
those of precedent surprising and even perplexing. The panel will discuss what
they do to help their international law students develop the skill of writing
fact-based U.S. legal analysis, including pre-writing to identify how U.S.
lawyers use facts in legal writing; planning to identify, select, and organize
arguments and counterarguments, and to choose the most relevant facts; writing
fact-based analysis effectively; and editing to strengthen the analysis, add or
revise factual descriptions, and look for errors.
Business
meeting at program conclusion.