Updates from the Georgetown Legal English Faculty (June 2023)

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Julie Lake

Professor Lake will spend the summer working with Professor Heather Weger to revise the language-focused curriculum for Fundamentals of Legal Writing for the 2023-2024 academic year. In Fall 2023, incoming Two-Year students will learn how to use language-based strategies to craft a high-quality memo (i.e., a lawyer-to-lawyer document). In Spring 2024,incoming Two-Year students will learn about the scholarly writing genre and how to write a high-quality mini-scholarly legal research paper. She will also research productive ways to use ChatGPT as a learning tool for law and linguistic students.
When she is not working, she will be traveling, hiking, and camping with her family. Her personal “language-based” summer project is to begin learning how to speak Spanish in preparation for her daughter’s new two-way Spanish-English immersion school.

Presented at the Sixth International Language & Law Conference at the University of Bialystok Faculty of Law in Bialystok, Poland in June. Title: “Approaching Legal English through Transactional Law.”
Will be teaching “Introduction to U.S. Contract Drafting and Interpretation” at IE University Law School in Madrid, Spain in June and July.
Presenting at the Twelfth Bonn Applied Linguistics Conference in Bonn, Germany in July. Title: “When multilingual litigants encounter monolingual ideologies in U.S. judicial opinions.”
Teaching “U.S. Legal Research, Analysis & Writing” for Georgetown Law’s Summer Experience program in August.
Traveling in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan with my family.

Professor Weger is excited to be traveling to South Korea this summer! On July 5, she will speak at an alumni event generously hosted by Mr. Seung-Hoon Lee, Chairman of Lee International IP & Law Group, Board Member of ALAAB, and alumnus of Georgetown Law Center and Seoul National University.
Prof. Weger is looking forward to making connections with the international community that Georgetown embraces and providing updates on the Law Center, including a focus on the innovative and impactful Two-Year LL.M. Program.

Continuing to work on her dissertation titled “The Semantic Rabbit Hole”
Preparing to teach “Advanced Scholarly Writing and Oral Communication in the Law” in the fall together with Profs. Julie Lake and Heather Weger.
Studying German at the Goethe Institut this summer (and loving it!).
Hosting Argentinian Legal Spanish expert Hairenik Aramayo for her US visit in July.
And she and her husband Pablo went to the Capital Wheel at National Harbor for Pablo’s birthday, and they received a photo!

Co-taught two online legal English courses (US Legal System; Legal Writing) during the spring for Ukrainian law students at National Technical University of Ukraine Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute as part of a collaborative effort by US law school professors to support Ukrainian law schools.
Quoted in ABA International Law News (Spring 2023) article titled “Global Law School Community Unites to Support Ukrainian Law Schools and Students.”
Received a grant from the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) for his proposal (with Prof. Daniel Edelson of Seton Hall Law) to create a self-guided online legal writing course that would make legal writing instruction easily available to students in Ukraine and anywhere else in the world at no cost and on their own schedule.