Sessions Information

  • January 4, 2018
    10:30 am - 12:15 pm
    Session Type: Section Programs
    Session Capacity: N/A
    Hotel: N/A
    Room: Pacific Ballroom Salon 24
    Floor: North Tower/Ground Level

    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.

Session Speakers
Texas A&M University School of Law
Moderator

Barwrite and Barwrite Press
Speaker

University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law
Speaker

University of Massachusetts School of Law - Dartmouth
Speaker

Temple University, James E. Beasley School of Law
Speaker

Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Moderator and Speaker

Session Fees
  • [4150] Graduate Programs for Non-U.S. Lawyers, Co-Sponsored by International Legal Exchange and North American Cooperation - Focus on the Facts: Teaching Civil-Law Trained Lawyers to Work with Facts in U.S. Legal Writing: $0.00