Stanford Law School is committed to training students to meet the highest professional standards. When our law students graduate, they serve as lawyers, law clerks, professors, government officials, activists and corporate executives. They also regularly work with lay people and professionals from a wide range of other disciplines. Stanford Law School's first year Legal Research and Writing program prepares students for these demands by focusing on the analysis of sophisticated legal problems and clear, persuasive writing.
Our first priority is to teach our students the legal analysis and writing they will do as practicing lawyers, though these skills are transferable across many professions. In LRW, students develop analytical and research skills, and they learn to become agile as writers and speakers, in the context of resolving a legal problem.
LRW is a required course for all first year law students because it teaches students the fundamental aspects of lawyering: how to read a case; how to parse a statute; how to distinguish between material and immaterial facts; how to find legal authorities relevant to legal problems; how to analyze a legal issue using facts and law; and how to communicate legal analysis logically, clearly and concisely. LRW also serves as a bridge to Stanford's clinical program, advanced writing courses, externships, and ultimately to law practice.
We teach LRW as a simulation. The simulation materials often consist of mock client interviews, depositions, and exhibits. Students work, independently and in groups, to resolve a client's legal problem using these simulation materials. By situating the legal writing assignments in the context of legal problem-solving, students learn through experience the interplay between fact investigation, legal research, legal analysis and writing. Law students, in their role as lawyers, work collaboratively with co-counsel and opposing counsel, and we use this setting to emphasize professional norms, ethics, timeliness, and courtesy, in addition to legal strategy.
Because legal research instruction is integrated into the simulation, our students engage in various legal research methods. We believe it is important that students learn to use both traditional and electronic resources. Over the course of the year, students research issues involving state and federal law, and use a broad range of legal authorities, including judicial opinions, statutes, legislative history, administrative regulations, law review articles, encyclopedias and practice manuals. Research is taught by both librarian lecturers, who bring their vast knowledge of traditional and electronic resources, and LRW lecturers, who teach using a process-oriented approach familiar to practicing lawyers. By the conclusion of the course, students are exposed to all major legal research methods.
The fall and spring curricula are designed to provide students with work that corresponds to their growing sophistication in legal analysis and writing. Students learn predictive analysis in the context of a semester-long pre-litigation client simulation in the fall, and persuasive analysis in a semester-long appellate moot court simulation in the spring.
In the fall, students receive rigorous training in reading and analyzing legal authority. Students closely read legal opinions and learn how to recognize the strategies adopted by legal writers to subtly persuade their audiences of the correctness of their decisions. Students then learn how to use these strategies — legal analysis, narrative, rhetoric, analogy and distinction, overarching legal theory and public policy — to frame and develop a legal argument based on legal authority. Students are taught to express their analysis with the clarity and precision that is the hallmark of excellent practicing lawyers.
In the spring, students further develop their analytical skills in the persuasive context. The spring program shifts to an advocacy perspective, as students take a simulated case from filing a notice of appeal through oral argument. Given the solid foundation of the fall program, students are able to tackle challenging legal issues requiring extensive research and in-depth analysis. Previous moot court problems have involved drug-related evictions from public housing, the death penalty, public employee free speech rights, the application of the American with Disabilities Act to websites, and the Fair Housing Act. Over the course of the semester, students write an appellate brief and prepare for oral argument. The course culminates in a moot court oral argument, which is judged by local attorneys and judges, many of whom are Stanford Law School alumni.
LRW is taught in small classes of approximately 30 students per section. LRW lecturers teach only one section, resulting in one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the country for programs with full-time teachers. This allows students to receive a great deal of individual attention, with intensive written feedback and individual conferences with LRW lecturers. All feedback is provided by full-time lecturers, not student assitants.
LRW lecturers are law fellows with experience as practicing lawyers. Fellows are selected based on their law practice experience, academic achievement, promise as legal scholars, and enthusiasm for teaching.
Inquiries about the program may be directed to:
We are not accepting applications for new Stanford Law Fellows teaching Legal Research and Writing for the 2010-2011 academic year. If you are interested in applying for the 2011-2012 academic year, please check this site in August 2010 for a job listing and application process.