Category: Curriculum Design

Updates from the Georgetown Legal English Faculty (September 2024)

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Lecturer of Legal English

Here’s what the Georgetown Legal English faculty have been up to since the end of the spring 2024 semester….

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Ben Cheng

Returning from parental leave, Prof. Cheng is set to teach sections of Legal English I and Professional Responsibility this fall. Additionally, he is working on a new Legal English Negotiations curriculum for the spring 2025 semester.

John Dundon

Professor Dundon had a busy summer, which started with his teaching an Advanced Contract Drafting class to LL.M. students at IE Law School in Madrid, Spain. It was his fifth summer teaching at IE Law, and he always feels very honored to be there – the school community is very welcoming, and the students themselves are always extremely impressive.

Next, Professor Dundon presented his research at two linguistics conferences in the United Kingdom: the i-Mean 7 Conference on Meaning in Social Interaction in Bristol, and then the 5th European Conference of the International Association for Forensic & Legal Linguistics in Birmingham. His first presentation was an explanation of procedural and evidentiary rules in U.S. trials that can affect linguistic analysis of trial testimony.  The second presentation summarized Professor Dundon’s recent research about how U.S. Supreme Court Justices and attorneys at oral arguments sometimes speak “on behalf” of institutions and clients, and how this phenomenon manifests in linguistic features.

Professor Dundon then spent a month in Taiwan, teaching Contract Drafting in English to law students at the National Chengchi University College of Law and practicing attorneys at the Taipei Bar Association. It was one of his largest-ever classes (over 100 students), and Professor Dundon learned an incredible amount about the Taiwanese legal system from his students. He’s been invited back for a similar program next year and hopes to expand the course offerings to cover additional material.

Finally, Professor Dundon taught U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing in Georgetown Law’s Summer Experience Program for entering LL.M. students.

Heather Weger & Julie Lake

It is hard to believe that the summer is almost over! We have several personal and professional highlights to share.

Prof. Julie Lake (left) and Prof. Heather Weger (right)

Vacations & Family Time

Since our last blog post, we took time to relax with our respective families. 

Professor Julie Lake spent much of the summer with family and friends in Cape May (New Jersey), Chapel Hill  (North Carolina), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Though the sun was in full force in Cape May (aka, the “beach”), the jellyfish prevented her from swimming in the ocean. (It is hard to conquer these lifelong fears!) She was able to spend time with her husband and daughter, watching movies and TV shows about unicorns, playing her guitar, and completing kid-friendly art projects. 

Professor Heather Weger traveled to Chicago (Illinois) and Richmond (Virginia) to visit her husband’s family), and she spent time with her Mom (from Arkansas) and sister (from North Carolina) as they visited her here in DC. She also spent a week at the beach (North Carolina), binge watching the Olympics, collecting sea shells with her children, and catching up on pleasure reading. Reconnecting with family always brings a renewed sense of identity and energy! 

Summer Projects

Between family trips and vacations, we have continued to refine our asset-based approach to teaching Legal English. Specifically, we presented at the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) Biennial Conference in Indianapolis in July. In our presentation, “Linguists in Law School: Rebooting Legal Education to Empower Multilingual Law Students,” we highlighted the value that multilingual law students bring to law school and showed effective pedagogical strategies to enhance their Legal English. We also enjoyed the presentations we attended, and we came away with practices ratified (e.g., mindfulness of cultural and linguistic references in teaching), new practices introduced (e.g., a new approach to cultivating creativity), and some practices overturned (e.g., unexpected ways of handling plagiarism). 

The Upcoming Academic Year

We look forward to another academic year with the Two-Year LL.M. program! 

We are offering a newly designed course to the Two-Year LL.M. students, Academic Legal English: Special Topics, which engages students in experiential learning to enhance their oral communication skills, grammar skills, and professional language skills. The course topics include:

  • Reflecting on Legal English Skills
  • Listening to a Law School Lecture
  • Optimizing Study Strategies for Law School
  • Using (& Not Using) Generative AI in Law School
  • Participating in and Facilitating Law School Discussions
  • Using Grammar in Legal Contexts: Conditionals
  • Writing Academic and Professional Emails
  • Exploring the Scholarly Writing Genre

We also look forward to some exciting upcoming projects with our legal English colleagues at several Ukrainian law schools.

  • We will continue to participate in the monthly working group with Ukrainian linguists teaching in the law context.
  • We are working on designing and delivering a writing retreat for colleagues at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in December 2024.

As we reflect on its evolution over since 2008, we are proud of the quality legal English curriculum that the team has developed. We welcome the new cohort of students and look forward to staying in touch with the students in their second year!

Stephen Horowitz

16th Global Legal Skills Conference (Bari, Italy; June 6-8, 2024)

Had a fantastic and productive experience at the 16th Annual Global Legal Skills Conference in Bari, Italy where I presented on the topic: “Making Legal English Accessible: Ukraine, Afghanistan & the US Bar Exam.”

I was also extremely honored to receive an “Individual Award”Recognition of Achievement in Global Legal Skills Education” award from the Global Legal Skills Institute for “creating collaborative exchanges between US and Ukrainian Legal Educators and for Promoting Legal Skills Education Around the World.”

The other fantastic part was getting to meet so many wonderful members of the Global Legal Skills community in person, including Mark Wojcik, David Austin, Lurene Contento, Chantal Morton, Kim Holst, Artem Shaipov, Louise Kulbicki, Natasha Costello, Claudia Amato, Lindsey Kurtz, Susan Dudley, John Thornton, Shelly Saltzman, Bythia Loudon, Kateřina Chudová, and many others. And particularly special was getting to finally meet in person Ukrainian law professors Oksana Kiriiak (Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University) and Nadiia Maksimentseva (Oles Gonchar Dnipro National University), who had both been active participants in all of the legal English trainings over the past year.

Prof. Oksana Kiriiak (left), Prof. Nadiia Maksimentseva (middle), & Prof. Horowitz (right)

Fact of the day: The bones of St. Nicholas (aka Santa Clause) are buried in the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in Bari. And thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I just started reading an amazing novel of historical fiction titled Nicked by M.T. Anderson which is set in Bari which tells the somewhat fictionalized story of how Santa’s bones ended up there.

Sri Lanka

Flew to Sri Lanka to lead workshops on legal English curriculum development for the University of Colombo and University of Jaffna in connection with USAID’s Efficient and Effective Justice (EEJ) Program in Sri Lanka. Also met with faculty from the Open University of Sri Lanka and University of Peradeniya to lay the groundwork for legal English curriculum support. Similar to the situation in Ukraine, law schools in Sri Lanka are in the process of moving to English-only curriculum.

Ukraine

  • Initiated conversations with Georgetown Law faculty to establish a sort of umbrella “Ukraine legal support” group within the Georgetown Law community in order to identify and connect the various people and entities within the law school that have been involved with providing law-related support to Ukraine. The goal is to be able to increase opportunities for collaboration and info sharing and also establish a central point of contact for inquiries, events, getting involved, etc.
  • Looking forward to re-starting the weekly Legal English Conversation sessions for Ukrainian law and legal English faculty that I’ve run for the past year. In each session, some subset of the 30+ Ukrainian faculty members and 30+ US/EU faculty members join and are paired off in breakout rooms for legal English conversation. (If interested in being added to the list of volunteers, please feel free to email me at stephen.horowitz@georgetown.edu.)
  • Looking forward to continuing to support the organization of Legal English trainings for Ukrainian law and legal English faculty.
  • Looking forward to continuing to support the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Peer-to-Peer Writing Project, which matches KMA students with American law students, including several from Georgetown Law for all three semesters the program has run so far.

ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship & Mentoring Pilot Program

Continued providing the online self-guided pre-LLM legal English program for fellows in the ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship & Mentoring Pilot Program. The course, which I co-created, is hosted on the USLawEssentials learning management system. The course is made available for free to all fellows in the program who have completed the legal English assessment designed by Prof. Lindsey Kurtz (Penn State Law), Prof. Dan Edelson (Seton Hall Law), and me last year to support the ABA Pilot Program.

The International Jurist

Was quoted in the article “Legal English Bridges law and language for foreign-educated LLM students,” written by Joshua Alter (Associate Dean of International Programs at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) which appeared in The International Jurist June 21, 2024.

Bar Exam Support for LLM Students

*Once again co-taught with Prof. Daniel Edelson (Seton Hall Law) a 4-week bar essay skills course (for MEE and MPT) this summer through USLawEssentials using a “pay what you can” model to make legal English bar support accessible to all LLM students who need it.

Online Legal English

Continued my annual tradition of teaching part of the summer pre-LLM English for American Law School course for incoming LLM students at St. John’s Law School. After leaving St. John’s in 2020, I collaborated with Daniel Edelson to create an online version of the summer legal English program in St. John’s Canvas system. The course content, which we designed to be used as both a synchronous or self-guided course, helps students learn the basics of the US legal system, US law school culture, legal writing, and case reading and analysis.

Fall 2024 Semester

Excited to be teaching sections of both Legal English and US Legal Research & Writing this semester to the Two-Year LLM students this fall semester!

Updates from the Georgetown Legal English Faculty (December 2023)

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Here’s what the Georgetown Legal English faculty have been up to over the fall 2023 semester….

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Heather Weger & Julie Lake & Michelle Ueland

Legal English team members Professors Julie Lake, Heather Weger, and Michelle Ueland designed and delivered an intensive 5-week Legal English program for the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine from November 13-December 15, 2023. They collaborated with Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security (with Professor Mitt Regan and Anna Cave) and the Atrocity Crime Advisory Group (ACA).

It was an honor to work with such dedicated colleagues and students. We look forward to future collaborations of this kind. Stay tuned for a more detailed blog post in January!

John Dundon

Professor John Dundon in Bonn, Germany

This September, Professor Dundon was invited to participate as a panel discussant at a linguistics conference at the University of Bonn, Germany. The title of the conference was “Language as a Social Practice: Constructing (a)symmetries in legal discourse,” and Professor Dundon spoke on a panel (together with professors from Germany and Finland) about how asymmetries in legal discourse can lead to societal injustice.

He thoroughly enjoyed attending the conference and considers himself very fortunate to have been invited to meet with so many leaders in the field of language and law. The conference proceedings will be published (together with a contribution from Professor Dundon) in an upcoming volume with Cambridge University Press.

In other news, Professor Dundon is finishing up his final year of coursework towards his doctorate in sociolinguistics. This semester, he is researching interactional features of Supreme Court oral arguments, and specifically the “production format” of utterances made by attorneys as they negotiate having to speak on behalf of themselves, their client, and their legal team. Professor Dundon is also conducting a survey of ideologies about language use and language learning on the public-facing websites of local bilingual schools in the District of Columbia.

Stephen Horowitz

Ukraine

*Collaborated with Artem Shaipov of USAID’s Justice For All program and several other legal English professors (Alissa Hartig, Susan Dudley, Catherine Beck, Oksana Kiriiak, and Linda Pope) to provide multiple legal English trainings for Ukrainian law faculty and legal English faculty over the course of the Fall 2023 semester.

*Led one of the trainings–9 sessions of Legal English Conversation–and recruited a cohort of 15 additional law/legal English volunteers (including colleague John Dundon) to engage with Ukrainian faculty in each Legal English Conversation session.

*Currently in the process of setting up additional trainings during Spring 2024. And planning a new round of matching Ukrainian law schools with any international law school/legal English faculty interested in teaching a course, guest lecturing, providing support for academic publishing, or helping in other ways. (Email Stephen.Horowitz@georgetown.edu if interested in volunteering in some capacity.)

*Recruited Georgetown Law JD students to participate in a six-week peer-to-peer legal writing project with students from Kyiv Molhya Academy University during the fall semester that involved JD students from several other US law schools as well. Currently recruiting more Georgetown Law students for the next session to start late January.

*In collaboration with law professor Alan Blakely, helped set up the Ukraine-related Resources Page.

*Reached a 500-day Duolingo streak for Ukrainian language study!

Afghanistan

*Continued conducting assessments for Afghan judges and lawyers in connection with the ABA Afghan Legal Professionals Scholarship & Mentoring Pilot Program. The assessment project is in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Edelson (Seton Hall/USLawEssentials.com) and Prof. Lindsey Kurtz (Penn State Law).

*Created, with Daniel Edelson, a self-guided online pre-LLM legal English program (i.e., Fundamentals of the US Legal System; Reading Cases; Legal Writing) to help prepare Afghan candidates getting ready to start an LLM program at a US law school.

*Currently working with ABA program leaders to recruit additional mentors–both law faculty and law students–to provide legal English and other support for the candidates. (Email Stephen.Horowitz@georgetown.edu if interested in volunteering.)

Japan

*Guest-lectured in three classes for the legal English course at Keio University Law School on the topics of Case Reading Strategies and the Language of Analogy.

USA

*Teaching a December/January “Bar Essay Writing Skills for LLM Students” online course for USLawEssentials together with Prof. Daniel Edelson. The course is designed to be accessible to all students who need it regardless of finances, and provides specialized bar essay writing support geared to non-native English speakers.

*Was the subject of interviews by Wordrake (on Legal English and Plain English) and Amicus Partners (on my career path to becoming a legal English professor.)

*Provided a book cover blurb for The “Getting to Yes” Guide for ESL Students and Professionals: Principled Negotiation for Non-Native Speakers of English by Barrie J. Roberts at the request of University of Michigan Press.

*Received a wonderful email from a former student, reprinted with her permission:

“I found out I passed the New York bar yesterday! I wanted to thank you specifically because both torts and criminal law came up on the exam. The torts essay was asking for all elements of negligence so that was our entire final exam for Legal English 1. The criminal law essay had 4 sub issues and they were all about Miranda rights, custodial interrogation and whether the defendant waived it knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently. Thank you again for the classes. I remember writing everything I learned from classes instead of from the bar prep materials for those two essays. I’m really grateful for that!” —Sokunthyda Long (Cambodia), graduate of the 2-Year LLM Program at Georgetown Law

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Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and peace-filled holidays and New Year!

Dissents, LLM students and learning to read cases

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

One of the challenges for many foreign-trained LLM students studying at a US law school, especially if they come from a civil law legal culture rather than a common law legal culture, is getting their brains to buy into the notion that the words and language and arguments that they read in a court opinion have weight. That statutes and statutory language is not the final say in a legal argument, but actually just a first step followed by a search for and review of case law that interprets various parts of a statute.

Click to see the full article.

A subsequent and related challenge for many foreign-trained LLM students (as well as for US-trained JD students) is then training their brains to also understand that, even though what a judge writes in a court opinion may constitute law (at the time and in the jurisdiction of that particular case), it is not infallible and may have major flaws in its arguments. And this is even more so in law school in the US where the goal of study is often not just about determining what the law is, but thinking about what it could or should be. And training one’s brain to analyze arguments in order to be able to construct effective arguments in the future.

In that vein, I recently came across an article about the role of dissenting opinions that may be helpful for foreign-trained LLM students trying to wrap their brain around the US common law legal system. (Or legal English professors trying to help them get there.) Because from the perspective of one trained in a civil law legal system, a dissenting opinion may seem rather extraneous.

Prof. Sherri Lee Keene, Georgetown Law

The article, “Teaching Dissents” (Minnesota Law Review, July 7, 2023) by Prof. Sherri Lee Keene of Georgetown Law, is intended to help law students better understand the significance of dissenting opinions.

The abstract of Prof. Keene’s article notes that, “Court opinions are often written to sound authoritative and sure, making legal decisions seem purely logical and channeling a tone of inevitability…… In contrast to the voice of the majority, which often seeks to draw attention away from conflicts, dissents can show where choices were made in the decision-making process, and where others could have been made.”

Prof. Keene highlights the notion that teaching and studying dissenting opinions is a great way for students to learn to be critical readers and “identify spaces where they can challenge existing precedent and advocate for positive change.”

And from a legal English perspective, I appreciate that Prof. Keene has provided those of us who work with foreign-trained LLM students a very useful tool for helping our students to more deeply understand and get comfortable with the concept the US common law legal system and its culture.

Below is the full abstract and a link to the article:

Continue reading “Dissents, LLM students and learning to read cases”

“The Language of Analogy” with Tashkent State University of Law

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

I want to thank Senior Teacher Munisa Mirgiyazova and her colleagues and students at Tashkent State University of Law for inviting me again to present via Zoom to their law students yesterday. (I presented last December on the topic of the benefits of extensive reading and listening.) This May 11 presentation was titled “The Language of Analogy.” (link to Google Slides), and I greatly enjoyed the questions and discussion and look forward to future collaborations with TSUL.

The presentation discussed the role of analogy in US legal writing and argumentation within the US common law legal system. And then it focused on the language patterns and parts of language used in 1) comparison and contrast, and 2) categorization.

Continue reading ““The Language of Analogy” with Tashkent State University of Law”

Video: “Some new-ish thoughts on post-pandemic Online Legal English (OLE)”

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Following up on the recent post “Georgetown Legal English at the 2023 ILEAC Annual Conference,” here is a link to the video of the presentation by Daniel Edelson and me on the topic “Some new-ish thoughts on post-pandemic Online Legal English (OLE.)” In it, we shared some examples of OLE models and content from the Georgetown Online Legal English course as well as from the St. John’s Law OLE course and the USLawEssentials’ OLE courses.

Video Links

Below are three different links to the same video (so you have multiple options in case one doesn’t work for some reason.)

Presentation Summary

Continue reading “Video: “Some new-ish thoughts on post-pandemic Online Legal English (OLE)””

AI/ChatGPT as a tool for Legal English and LLM students


Post by Prof. Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

As we start to shift past the “wow” factor of AI and ChatGPT (see, e.g., this very cool post from the FCPA Blog posing questions to ChatGPT related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and also this academic article titled “GPT Takes the Bar Exam“), I’ve seen articles and social media posts and heard comments and commentary focused on the potential plagiaristic dangers of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-fueled chatbot that can produce complex, natural-sounding essays in a matter of seconds:

But my initial reaction was less of concern and more along the lines of, “What a great potential legal English tool! How can we use this to help our LLM students learn better?”

And this thinking feels connected to what I’ve read in articles like “AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing” by Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education which essentially says that the horse is out of the barn; how are we as teachers and educational institutions going to adapt our assessment methods and how can we use this as a teaching tool. (This is really the underlying point of “The End of High School English” as well.)

Some of my own tests of ChatGPT, by the way, have included:

1) To ask it to “write an essay comparing Marie Antoinette and Rachel Carson,” the idea being to see if it could find connections on two seemingly unrelated people. And it did this quite effectively, acknowledging the lack of connection but finding comparison and contrast in that they were women of different social status who had certain accomplishments. About as good as I could expect from any student given a similar question.

Continue reading “AI/ChatGPT as a tool for Legal English and LLM students”

Thank you to Tashkent State University of Law!

I want to take a moment to thank Senior Teacher Munisa Mirgiyazova and her colleagues and students at Tashkent State University of Law for inviting me to give an online webinar earlier this week on “The Benefits of Extensive Reading and Listening in Studying Law in English.” I greatly enjoyed the discussion and getting to meet everyone, and I look forward to future collaborations.

Reflecting on the presentation afterwards, I also realized that the collaborative opportunity came about because I posted something on LinkedIn (a new podcast episode maybe? I can’t remember now.) And Munisa saw it and sent me a LinkedIn connection request. I accepted and asked her how teaching was going in Tashkent. She replied and asked me how my teaching was going at Georgetown Law, and the subsequent conversation led to a discussion of ways to collaborate. A reminder that it’s often a good idea to leave conversational doors open and ask people about themselves.

I plan to share a recorded version of the presentation on this site after I make some edits to the original presentation and create the recording. Stay tuned!

Here’s the flyer for the event created by Tashkent State University of Law:

Georgetown Legal English Faculty Update: What we did over the summer

We haven’t posted much on here over the last few months, and that’s in a large part because we’ve all had busy summers. Below are updates on what some of the Georgetown Legal English faculty has been up to over the summer:

Professor Craig Hoffman

Prof. Craig Hoffman

Professor Hoffman is back at Georgetown Law this fall after being on sabbatical in the spring.  While on sabbatical, he traveled to Iceland, Argentina, Uruguay, France, England, and Scotland.  In October, Professor Hoffman will accompany Dean Treanor on a trip to the Gulf.  The law school will be hosting alumni receptions in Riyadh and Dubai.  In addition to teaching his classes in the Legal English Program, Professor Hoffman will teach a seminar in the spring called Language and Law in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University.

Professor Julie Lake & Professor Heather Weger

Prof. Julie Lake
Prof. Heather Weger

Professor Weger and Professor Lake spent the summer revising their innovative language-focused curriculum for Fundamentals of Legal Writing for the 2022-2023 academic year. In the fall semester, the students will learn about the lawyer-to-lawyer genre and gain language-based strategies to write a high-quality memo. In the spring semester, the students will learn about the scholarly writing genre and how to write a high-quality mini-scholarly legal research paper.

Professor John Dundon

Prof. John Dundon

This June and July, Professor Dundon was thrilled to return to IE Law School in Madrid, Spain, where he’s been teaching a class on contract drafting for the past three summers.  The course is designed to simulate real-life contract-drafting assignments, with a primary focus on contracts governed under U.S. law. After teaching in Spain, Prof. Dundon spent several weeks traveling through Eastern Europe with his son, including a stop in Budapest, where he took some Hungarian lessons.

In August, Prof. Dundon taught a section of U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing as part of the Summer Experience at Georgetown Law, which is a program designed to allow entering LL.M. students get a head-start on their coursework. Work also continued all summer in Prof. Dundon’s Ph.D. program, and he finalized a couple of linguistics articles over the summer for submission to academic journals.

Professor Paula Klammer

Prof. Klammer and her husband Pablo at the opera

This was Prof. Klammer’s first summer at Georgetown! She spent most of her summer at Williams Library working on her PhD in Law dissertation on the intricate relationship between law and language and what that means for legal education.

But being on campus all summer paid off and she had the unique opportunity to meet Georgetown Law’s Summer Institute students thanks to Professor Michael Cedrone’s kind invitation to sit in on his Foundations of U.S. Law course and to attend the Legal Writing Institute’s Biennial Conference at Georgetown law. (You can read more about Paula’s experience at the conference here.) Following that course, she helped Professor Craig Hoffman teach US Legal Research & Writing (USLRAW) to the summer institute students in preparation to co-teach the course with him during the Fall semester. 

Prof. Klammer with her husband at the Washington Nationals game

But it wasn’t all work and no play. She also explored DC with her husband, going to everything from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival at the Mall to the Opera at Wolf Trap, while watching the Nats win a couple of games (and lose many others!) at Nationals Park.

Professor Patricia Dutra

In August, Prof. Dutra taught a section of the U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing to the Summer Institute students. The rest of her summer was busy getting her youngest son ready to go off to college. She is now teaching a section of US Legal Research & Writing to students in the Two-Year LLM Program. 

You can also read a great interview with Prof. Dutra by the Georgetown Brazilian Law Association (aka BrazLA) published in March 2022.

Professor Stephen Horowitz

Prof. Stephen Horowitz

Starting in May, Professor Horowitz set up two Georgetown Law Online Legal English (OLE) courses available to all incoming Georgetown LLM students to help them prepare for the Fall 2022 semester–OLE: Orientation to the US Legal System and OLE: Reading Cases. In May, Professor Horowitz also co-created and co-taught an online legal English writing course to a cohort of female judges from Afghanistan, collaborating with Seton Hall Law School Professor Daniel Edelson who is founder of the USLawEssentials.com online legal English platform. Profs. Horowitz and Edelson also designed an online legal English course on reading US case law to be offered to Ukrainian law students during the fall 2022 semester.

In addition to his teaching, Prof. Horowitz also continued his series of multilingual lawyer interviews for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, including interviews with Georgetown’s Tax LLM Director Ellis Duncan, University of Minnesota Law School legal English professor Karen Lundquist, immigration lawyer Nick Harling, and Italian legal English teacher and legal translator Claudia Amato. Professor Horowitz also enjoyed a Great American Roadtrip with his family this summer that took them through a total of 17 different states.

New Georgetown Online Legal English Course: “OLE: Reading Cases”

Post by Prof. Stephen Horowitz, Legal English Lecturer

Research Help | Georgetown Law Library | Georgetown Law

I’m very excited to share that Georgetown Law’s Center for Legal English is now offering a second self-paced online legal English course titled Online Legal English (OLE): Reading Cases (beta version) which is currently available to all incoming Georgetown LLM students (1-year LLMs as well as those in the 2-year LLM program.)

I created the course last year as a complement to the first course I developed–OLE: Orientation to the US Legal System. And this spring we began offering both courses at no additional cost to all incoming LLM students so that they can start preparing for the fall semester and gain relevant background knowledge in a way that is as convenient for them as possible.

(Note: I think this makes us the first and only law school to offer entirely asynchronous, self-paced legal English courses. But if anyone knows of any other ones out there, please let me know and I’ll post an update here.)

While OLE: Orientation to the US Legal System focuses on the US legal system, separation of powers, and federalism in a way that enables students to improve their legal English through the study materials and activities, OLE: Reading Cases introduces students to the concept of what a case is (and isn’t) in the US legal system and teaches students how to analyze the language and discourse of cases in order to better comprehend them and better anticipate the questions they will need to address in class and on assignments.

The course is unfortunately not able to be made available to non-Georgetown students for technical reasons beyond our control, but below are a few screenshots to give a sense of what it contains.

[Update: A few people have contacted me to say they’re not a Georgetown student but would love to be able to take a course like this. If you’re not a Georgetown student but are interested in finding other online legal English options, just get in touch with me at sh1643@georgetown.edu and I’m happy to help.]

And I’m always happy to chat and share about the ideas and planning that went into the course if anyone is ever interested in discussing. Just get in touch.

Continue reading “New Georgetown Online Legal English Course: “OLE: Reading Cases””

LLMs and JD students: Creating opportunities for interaction

Post by Prof. Stephen Horowitz, Legal English Lecturer

Question: Aside from class integration and language partners, have you done any programs at your respective schools that have been particularly effective at bringing these groups together?

I recently saw the above question (on a listserv for LLM program administrators) about ways to foster connections between LLM students and JD students, as this type of integration is something greatly appreciated by LLM students and can make a program more appealing and provide a richer and fuller experience for LLM students.

For JD students, on the other hand, this is not necessarily something many of them are seeking as they often have their own priorities and pressure-filled law school lives. So how do you flush out the JD students who might be interested in connecting with LLM students? Or create opportunities for connection and interaction that are genuinely engaging and don’t feel forced?

Here are some previous ideas and experiences I shared for building LLM-JD connections and interaction that are a little outside the usual ideas and which I thought may be helpful or inspire new ideas:

Continue reading “LLMs and JD students: Creating opportunities for interaction”
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