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:
My 2-Year LLM Program Legal English colleagues Prof. Ben Cheng and Prof. John Dundon and I have been “doing” legal English for a good while now. We know how to speak, write, and generally communicate in culturally sensitive and appropriate ways. We know how to grade our speech for multilingual learners. And it’s second nature to adjust our communications to factor in or address any potential gaps in our students’ US cultural knowledge.
But we still make mistakes.
The latest comes from the big issue-spotter question on the spring final exam for our students. The topic was criminal procedure. More specifically, Miranda rights and when a person is “in custody” and when a police officer is subjecting an individual to “interrogation.”
Yi Song, the Executive Director for Graduate and International Programs and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law, is the founder of the Master of Laws Interviews Project. The project provides curated insights to help internationally trained lawyers to establish and develop their U.S. legal careers.
As a legal English professor in Georgetown’s 2-Year LLM Program and a “law & language” nerd, I greatly appreciate any efforts to analyze and identify concrete elements of legal writing that help distinguish the quality or genre of the writing. (See, e.g., some of my experiments with ChatGPT and legal writing as a grammar fixer and on cohesion.)
For my international LLM students, this kind of information can be exponentially more helpful to understand that, e.g., dependent clauses can help one’s legal analysis come across more cohesively, as opposed to suggestions to “Include more analysis” or “Be more concise.” A dependent clause is an objectively defined thing that you can hang a hat on. And even if a student doesn’t know what it is or how to recognize or construct it, it’s something that is very learnable.
I was therefore very excited to come across the below Twitter thread from UNLV Legal Writing Professor and Write.law founder Joe Regalia today, explaining that he was in the midst of a linguistic comparison involving 10 court opinions written by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (renowned for the quality of her writing) and 50 legal briefs written by various lawyers. In his tweets he shares some early observations from the analysis. Though alas, it’s just a teaser and it seems like we’ll have to wait for the full report or article to come out at some point to see the rest. If this were published as a book, I would be right there in the line outside Barnes & Nobles with all the other lawyer linguists waiting to get one of the first copies, a la Harry Potter mania.
Recently on the Legal Writing Institute listserv, a request was made for examples of ways to help teach cross-cultural competency. And I shared with the requester the following two activities from when I worked at St. John’s Law which I think were very effective for both teaching cross-cultural competency and also for fostering interaction between JD and LLM students. I think they also helped shift perspectives away from a deficit mindset of LLM students and toward a view that recognizes and takes advantage of the asset that LLM students are to a US law school.
Activity #1: Legal Writing Role Play
This activity involved collaboration between an LLM legal writing section and a JD writing section. It was the result of brainstorming with the JD legal writing professor and coming up with a plan based on the legal writing assignment the JD students would already be doing. The role play would explain to both the JD and LLM students that they were associates in a global law firm but in offices in different countries. And they had no previous relationship or interaction.
On the Academic Support Professionals listserv the other day, a great question popped up:
“Can anyone recommend resources for international JD students looking to improve their baseline knowledge of the US legal/political systems and/or US history? A faculty member teaching [course name] is looking for recommendations for a student who attended high school and college outside of the US. The faculty member believes this student would benefit from resources that explain the US government at a more basic level than what is covered in the course. Thanks in advance for any resources or leads!”
I really appreciated this question for a few reasons:
(1) International JD students (i.e., students who didn’t grow up in the US education system) are a growing segment of the law school community, yet they generally don’t get the same level of legal English support that international LLM students may receive. Plus their needs are often different from both regular JD students and international LLM students.
(2) Background and cultural knowledge is such a significant component of comprehension in US law school, yet it’s difficult to acquire if you didn’t grow up with it. And if you did grow up in the US, it’s hard to notice or be aware of the challenges of functioning effectively in US law school without it (or with less of it.)
I’ve been keeping my eyes open for years for resources that can help international LLM students with this, and that’s part of the reason I created the Legal English Resources page on this blog.
But until I saw the question above, I’d never organized my thoughts specifically with international JD students in mind. Yet the answers poured forth quickly and enthusiastically in my email response to the listserv. And so I figured this information might be helpful for others as well.
One of the key qualities of these resources, by the way, is that they generally don’t require much extra work on the part of the professor or student advisor. You can pretty much hand any of these off to students and let them run with it. Or, if they require a little preparation, once you’ve done it once, you don’t have to think about it again after that.
Resources to help International JD students learn important background information about US history, the US political system, and the US legal system.
1. Civics101 Podcast (produced by New Hampshire public radio) – lots of short episodes on a wide range of topics. In their own words, “What’s the difference between the House and the Senate? How do landmark Supreme Court decisions affect our lives? What does the 2nd Amendment really say? Civics 101 is the podcast about how our democracy works…or is supposed to work, anyway.”
2. Street Law: A Course in Practical Law textbook – used primarily for high school students, but great for international students too. Plus a glossary in the back! I’ve used parts of the book with LLM students in the past and also pointed a colleague to it who used several chapters to develop an entire legal English criminal law course for international LLM students.
3. iCivics – an online ed company that creates materials to teach civics to US students. I haven’t had occasion to use any of their materials yet, but an intriguing option worth checking out. Here’s a description of who they are in their own words: “iCivics champions equitable, non-partisan civic education so that the practice of democracy is learned by each new generation. We work to inspire life-long civic engagement by providing high quality and engaging civics resources to teachers and students across our nation.”
4. Newsela.com – It’s a huge extensive reading library of real news and other articles written at 5 different levels of difficulty (or ease.) And it’s accessible for free with registration. While most of it is news articles, there’s also a whole section on civics/US history and a number of articles that might be helpful. For example, I remember they have the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Brown v Board & Plessy v Ferguson all written and re-written at 5 different levels of difficulty. Also profiles of famous Americans including some presidents, Supreme Court justices, civil rights leaders, etc. But you have to sift through to find some of this stuff. Also, they may have put a paywall up on some of the materials other than the news articles since I last used it.
5. Khan Academy has a slew of video lessons on history and civics. The key is narrowing it down. During the pandemic, I created a Khan Academy “course” for Georgetown LLM students to use by just adding the units and lessons that seemed relevant and told students to register and use it if they want to learn more beyond my actual class with them. In total, I found about 35 different lessons/items that felt relevant and appropriate to include in my “class.” There’s a screenshot below to give you a sense of some of the topics. But feel free to contact me directly if you want to know which ones they are so you can create your own class. Happy to share.
This game is based on a clever children’s book of the same name. My kids (5, 7 and 11 at the time) got into it during the pandemic, and in addition to being super fun and super easy, within a few weeks they had all absorbed every state, state capital, and state nickname in addition to having a sense of where the states are located. I’ve learned over the years that my international students often have little sense of US geography outside of New York and Los Angeles. US geography is important background knowledge to have in US law school as it often provides vital context. Yet US geography is rarely ever taught to international law students. And when it is, it’s hard to do as effectively as this game does. Let international JD students spend a couple hours playing this and they’ll be all set with their geography. And you’ll have a great time if you play with them!
7. Legal English Resources page on the Georgetown Legal English Blog: In addition to all the items listed above, there are many more on the Legal English Resources page. So I encourage you to take a look. Maybe you’ll find something else there that fits the needs of your students. (Or maybe you’ll have a suggestion for a helpful resource that I didn’t know about!)
In it, Georgetown Law’s Jonah Perlin (associate professor of law, legal practice and creator of the HowILawyer podcast) re-examines the classic Christmas comedy Home Alone (starring Macaulay Culkin) and delves into what legal case the house robbers Marv and Harry might have against their 8-year-old foe, who goes to very creative lengths to foil their robbery attempts.
A fun way to work on one’s legal English over the holiday break, especially since the video has captions and Jonah provides very clear yet simple explanations!
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:
This post from the Language Log blog about being able to identify essays created by Large Language Models like ChatGPT titled “Detecting LLM-created essays?” (And yes, it does appear that unhelpfully for those of us in the legal English world there is now a new and confusing meaning of LLM! Maybe some of us need to start being more intentional about including those periods in LL.M. 🙂
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.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview my colleague Paula Klammer for the Multilingual Lawyer interview series for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, a podcast aimed at helping foreign-educated lawyers and law students improve their legal English.
Here’s a summary of the episode from USLawEssentials:
The USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast continues its series of interviews with multilingual lawyers as Stephen Horowitz interviews Professor Paula Klammer.
Paula is a legal English Lecturer & Research Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Legal English. Currently earning her Ph.D. in Law from Universidad de Palermo in Argentina, Paula is an experienced lawyer and translator and is bilingual in Spanish and English. She speaks a few other languages, too, including French and Brazilian Portuguese (but she’s modest and says she’s not proficient yet).
This is a really cool interview with a fascinating guest. Paula’s bilingual background and her work as a translator enable her to provide insights on the special challenges of translating legal English, especially when dealing with false cognates, different writing styles, and very different legal systems.
Link to the episode is in the comments.
And hey – – do you think Spanish people speak faster or slower than most English speakers? Not sure? Got a hunch? You’ll find out.
Paula also discusses her doctoral dissertation so you’re going to learn a lot from this podcast.
Enjoy and let us know what you liked most about this episode.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
