English for Academic Purposes – Georgetown Legal English Blog

2-Year LLM graduate Ji Woong Seok’s article on crypto regulation published

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Legal English Lecturer

We are excited to share that Georgetown Two-Year LLM program 2024 graduate Ji Woong Seok recently had his article titled “Standardizing a Global Regulatory Framework: Lessons Learned from a Comparative Study of the U.S., the E.U., and South Korea’s Regulation of Crypto Assets” published in Business and Finance Law Review (BFLR) (Vol. 7 Issue 2), a publication of The George Washington Law School connected with GW’s Center for Law, Economics, & Finance (C-LEAF).

Seok, who is a Senior Manager for Korea Securities Depository and will continue his legal studies in an SJD program this coming fall, cited his work with Prof. Heather Weger in the Fundamentals of Legal Writing course–which all Georgetown Two-Year LLM students take in their first semester–and with Prof. Weger and Prof. Paula Klammer in the Advanced Scholarly Legal Writing course taken during Seok’s second semester of the program.

According to Seok, “I learned how to effectively write a paper in English from the FLW/ASW class. First, I learned how to write a systematic outline. Before the class, I just wrote a rough table of contents when writing. The systematic outline, from the main to the detailed contents, helped me write better. In addition, this class taught how to ensure readers can easily understand the argument through the appropriate placement of main and supporting sentences and anticipate the flow through roadmap sentences. Also, I learned to write a paper concisely by reducing minor facts and simple materials. Lastly, the FLW/ASW class also taught us that the process of reading and revising the paper multiple times is really important. I greatly appreciate Prof. Weger’s and Prof. Klammer’s teaching for two years. It will be of great help in my future SJD course!”

Below is the abstract of the article. You can also click here to access a PDF of the full article.

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Standardizing a Global Regulatory Framework: Lessons Learned from a Comparative Study of the U.S., the E.U., and South Korea’s Regulation of Crypto Assets

Ji Woong Seok

ABSTRACT*

Since 2009, various crypto currency tokens (commonly called coins) have emerged, utilizing innovative technologies like blockchain and distributed ledger technology to establish decentralization of finance. The starting point of decentralization was Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper about payment without intermediaries. Since Bitcoin boomed, many experts have predicted that blockchain-based crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, will replace current payment methods and facilitate a shift from centralized to distributed systems of transactions. Furthermore, the public recognizes crypto assets as new objects of investment.

In response to these changes, global market players are developing new financial instruments and systems, and governments have been establishing regulatory frameworks for over ten years. The United States (U.S.) has utilized existing regulations, such as commodities regulation, to respond quickly, while the European Union (E.U.) and South Korea have pursued regulation through new legislation to regulate crypto asset industries.

A fundamental inquiry arises as to whether these tokens, which failed as a payment method, should be regulated as commodities and securities. Suppose new and similar digital things, such as blockchain-based Pokémon or sports trading cards, emerge and are frequently traded in. Should they be subject to these commodities or securities regulations? In situations with uncertain regulatory direction, crypto assets regulation is necessary because huge transactions, similar to those of other financial instruments, are being made between global investors, and investors should be protected from various crimes, such as fraud.

Lastly, the regulatory direction should focus on stabilizing the market, preventing unfair practices, and ensuring investor protection. Moreover, continuous monitoring and international cooperation are needed for the evolving crypto asset industry.

In this paper, I argue that we need a standardized global framework to regulate crypto assets. This conclusion is drawn from analyzing cases in the U.S., the E.U., and South Korea with global regulatory approaches. Specifically, the pros and cons of each country’s regulations covering the “creation and sale of crypto assets,” “crypto asset-related business,” and “investor protection” were examined.

*This article is based on an assignment submitted for the CMDTY & Derivatives Markets class (Prof. Peter Malyshev & Paul Hayeck) at Georgetown Law.

LE Journal: ChatGPT conversations with Ukrainian legal English faculty

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English. LE Journal is an opportunity to share some of the current goings-on of Georgetown Law’s Legal English Faculty.

Professors Julie Lake and Heather Weger met via Zoom this week with four Ukrainian philologists (i.e, historical linguists) to discuss pedagogical approaches and the use of Chat GPT in Legal English classrooms.

The Ukrainian legal English faculty members were Anetta Artsysshevska, Nataliya Hrynya, and Lily Kuznetsova from Lviv Ivan Franko National University and Olena Zhyhadlo from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Law School.

We enjoyed a fruitful conversation about our collective successes and challenges, and we plan to meet again in February to continue the conversation.

The relationship evolved from a larger effort initiated by the Global Legal Skills community back in 2022 to foster connections and collaboration among law and legal English faculty in Ukraine

The (mis-)use of “Besides,…..”

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

I have nothing personal against the conjunctive adverb “Besides,….”

However, I’ve frequently noticed that “Besides,…..” is used by some foreign-trained LLM students in lieu of connecting phrases such as “Additionally,….” or “Furthermore,…..” And the students don’t realize that “Besides” has a different feeling and nuance, and is not an equal substitute for other connecting words used to signal that the sentence is adding information related to the previous sentence.

For example:

(Ex. 1) “The US Constitution granted the federal government with certain enumerated powers, while the state governments were granted residual powers. Besides, the federal government and the state governments share some common powers as well.”

(Ex. 2) “In this case, Jason was in his home with two officers sitting across from him at the kitchen table, and the officers’ car’s police lights were flashing for all to see. Besides, Jason’s mother was marking making breakfast in kitchen, which means his mother leave left Jason alone to talk with the officers.”

As a result, I find myself frequently providing corrective written feedback along the following lines:

“Besides,….” is not the connecting word you should use here. A better word would be “Additionally,…” or “Furthermore,…..”

Although we do use “besides” to communicate to the reader that we are adding more information, “besides” also feels less neutral and more informal than a word like “additionally.” It feels kind of pushy, like trying to persuade the other person by appealing to the their sense of personal connection to you.

For example, “Come on, let’s go see the movie tonight. It’s Friday night and you’re assignment isn’t due for a week. Besides, all of our friends are going to be there.”

In the above sentence, “Besides” works well in communicating the intent to persuade. It’s appropriate between friends when one friend is trying to push the other friend into changing their mind. But this informal, pushy feeling undermines your credibility in legal writing when your intention is just to add more information, e.g., one more reason or example, and let the example itself help with the persuading.

In other words, “besides” is saying more to your reader than you probably intend to say. For these reasons, I suggest using “Additionally” or “Furthermore” (among other options) as a connecting phrase in your legal writing rather than using “Besides,….”

I find myself writing this kind of comment so frequently, in fact, that I finally decided it would be more time effective to just write a blog post about it so that I can always share with my students in the future. ~~Besides~~ Additionally, now other legal English and legal writing instructors can use this as well, if it helps make their work a little easier.

In the meantime, if anyone ever figures out what English language textbook or publisher keeps teaching “besides” as an exact synonym for “additionally,” please let me know so I can lead an effort to try and address the problem at the source.

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Bonus: This language (mis-)use example reminds me of when I taught English in a middle school in Japan years ago. From my well-meaning supervisors I would occasionally hear statements like, “You had better sit down now.” Or, “You had better eat the food now.” Each time I wondered why they were threatening me, even though a threat seemed unnecessary in the situation. But then I realized their English classes must have taught them that the phrase “(you) had better” is a synonym for “should.” And it is. Sometimes. But sometimes it can also sound like an organized crime family member making a veiled threat. Thereafter, I told myself, “You had better get to the source of that misinformation before leaving Japan.” But alas, I never did.

Oh well, in both instances it could be a lot worse. Besides, at least it gives me something fun to write about!

“How to publish an academic article in the US?” by Sebastian Luengo-Troncoso

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

A great post (and new blog/website) by Sebastian Luengo-Troncoso, a Chilean lawyer and currently a doctoral (S.J.D.) candidate at Georgetown Law titled, “How to Publish an Academic Article in the US?“

Sebastian, who has an Environmental and Energy Law LLM from Georgetown and previously worked for the Chilean Ministry of the Environment, asks on behalf of many international LLM students past, present, and future, “What are the essential things to consider when publishing a law academic article in the US?” And then proceeds to answer the question in very helpful ways.

As a member of The Center for Legal English at Georgetown Law, I teach our yearly workshop to graduate students entitled “From a Seminar Paper to a Publication.” Here are some key takeaways to consider:

Click here to read the full post.

Prof. Weger’s Grammar Workshop for Georgetown 2-Year LLM students

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English, with special thanks to Prof. Julie Lake

Georgetown Law and its Two-Year LLM Program students are fortunate to have Applied Linguistics expert Prof. Heather Weger on the faculty to help multilingual law students with their writing skills.

This week Prof. Weger, who holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, held a Grammar- Focused Workshop to introduce students to specific strategies to improve their self-editing skills. Self-editing is a notoriously difficult skill to develop, and students benefit from tailored support and direct practice. In Prof. Weger’s words, “My goal is to help students engage with their language choices so that they can express their thoughts and personality with clarity and confidence.”

The workshop had two components: (1) A hands-on review activity to review strategies to correct clause-level errors and write more concisely and (2) a Grammar Review Workbook with several self-diagnostic and self-study activities The workbook, created by Prof. Weger, was designed with input from the Legal English team and tailored for students in the Two-Year LL.M. program.

Teaching grammar in legal writing?

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Prof. Rachel T. Goldberg of Cornell Law School recently published an intriguing article titled “Recovering Grammar” in The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.

In the article, she proposes an idea that is not necessarily new to those teaching legal English or English for Academic Purposes. But it is likely new, and likely goes against the grain, for those in the US law school legal writing community.

The main point: There’s a whole other way to think about grammar than the way you probably learned to think about it. And it involves shifting to an understanding of grammar as one more rhetorical tool in a legal writer’s rhetorical toolbox, i.e., connecting grammar to communicative purpose, rather than viewing grammar as a series of pedantic, nitpicky rules to be followed for the sake of propriety.

Article: Using ChatGPT in legal writing

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Joe Regalia, Associate Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at University of Nevada Las Vegas, recently shared on the Legal Writing Institute listserv that he’s been working on a chapter of a book that he will be publishing with Aspen Publishing later this year—tentatively called Leveling Up Your Legal Writing: Techniques and Technology to Create Amazing Documents.

The chapter–still in draft form–aims to be a practical guide for using ChatGPT in legal writing and can be viewed at this link for free in PDF format:

https://ssrn.com/abstract=4371460

Joe noted that even though he hasn’t even added sources yet to the draft chapter, he wanted to share in case any of the ideas are helpful to folks exploring using GPT in their classes.

Analyzing ChatGPT’s ability as a grammar fixer

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

I recently tried a simple yet potentially helpful ChatGPT activity with my LLM students to (a) build individual grammar awareness, (b) build a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of using ChatGPT to fix one’s grammar, and (c) gain a better understanding of what happens grammatically when ChatGPT is asked to fix grammar.

The Process:

As part of the Legal English II course (which teaches US case reading and analysis via a series of Supreme Court decisions about Miranda rights to students in Georgetown Law’s 2-Year LLM program), my students were required to write an essentially IRAC-style answer in response to a fact pattern under timed conditions.
Afterwards, as an assignment, I asked my students to input their essay into ChatGPT with the instruction to “Please fix any language issues in this essay:“
Students then had to compare the two versions of their essay and write a short analysis or commentary on what they noticed, what ChatGPT did/didn’t do well, how they felt about it, etc. I told students to either put the two versions in a table so they could compare the language side by side, or they could do a use the redline/track changes function to show the differences.
I next reviewed the students’ submissions myself. And I then invited two Georgetown Legal English colleagues with PhDs in applied linguistics–Prof. Julie Lake and Prof. Heather Weger–to review the student submissions and then have a group discussion about what we noticed.
Upon additional consideration (and inspired by a suggestion from Jack Kenigsberg, a former Hunter MA TESOL classmate), I took one paragraph from one student’s essay and fed it into ChatGPT with the instruction: “Fix any grammar errors in the quoted text. For each change you make, explain why you made the change.” And after it provided its answer, I clicked “Regenerate response” to create a second response to see what (if anything) came out different a second time.

The Takeaways:

The main takeaways by my students, my colleagues and myself were:

Tip of the day: How to use ChatGPT to figure out if a text was written by ChatGPT

Post by Prof. Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

I had a thought about a week ago that perhaps the best way to check and see if a text written by a student was in fact written by ChatGPT or other AI. And it turns out there is a way to do it, but it’s not the way I thought it might work.

I had already tested ChatGPT by giving it the same final exam fact pattern/question I had given to my LLM students. And ChatGPT was able to provide a pretty decent response.

So next, I took that response and fed it back to ChatGPT asking it if ChatGPT had written this text. But ChatGPT responded by explaining that it has no memory, etc. So I figured that was the end of it.

However, I learned today from a commenter on LinkedIn that, as in law school, it’s really about asking the right questions. And in this case, the right questions is:

“Is this text AI-generated?”

This led to a very definite response that, yes, this text was indeed AI-generated. Problem solved!

Update: I learned after publishing this post that this is not exactly “problem solved.” A colleague at another law school shared that he followed a process similar to mine, but ChatGPT believe that the text was in fact written by a human. So the “tip” is far from foolproof.

But I wasn’t satisfied, so I asked it how it knew. And it very quickly and confidently listed off several factors:

“As an AI language model, I can recognize patterns and characteristics in text that are typical of machine-generated text. In this particular case, the text is characterized by a high level of technical language, a formal tone, and a logical structure that is typical of texts written by AI. In addition, the text does not contain any errors or irregularities that would be expected if it had been written by a human. All of these features suggest that the text was generated by AI.”

Wonderful! But wait a second….Lots of people, including most law students at Georgetown and other law schools, are trained to write with these very same characteristics. So I asked, “Can you be more specific?”

And it essentially listed the same characteristics, but this time in a numbered format which made it appear much more specific and persuasive. Even though it wasn’t.

So then I asked it specifically, “What kinds of differences might distinguish a text written by a highly skilled writer and a text generated by AI?” But it listed qualities that might distinguish a human’s writing from AI, such as style, creativity, context and human touch. As a representative of the human race, I guess I’ll take those as compliments. But it still doesn’t provide any concrete examples as to how it can distinguish between a highly-skilled human writer and an AI app like ChatGPT.

In other words, ChatGPT was essentially borrowing from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who famously said in his decision on obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964))

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: