Legal Writing for LLM Students – Georgetown Legal English Blog

Updates from the Georgetown Legal English Faculty (December 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 summer 2024. (Click here to see previous Updates from the Legal English Faculty.)

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Heather Weger & Julie Lake

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

The end of the semester is upon us! This fall, we were thrilled to welcome a stellar group of students to the Two-Year LLM Program.

Fall Projects

Reinvigorated from presenting at the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) Biennial Conference in Indianapolis in July, we split our curricular energy in the reiterative cycle of refining our Fundamentals of Legal Writing course (a course that helps multilingual legal writers develop an authoritative voice for the genre of legal memo writing) and designing a new course, Academic Legal English I (a course that provides multilingual law students with opportunities to develop speaking and networking skills useful for navigating law school and the legal profession).

Beyond the classroom, we continued making progress with many other professional projects, including a monthly working group with Ukrainian linguists teaching in the law context, planning a writing retreat for colleagues at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in AY 2025-2026, and drafting a book proposal on writing instruction for multilingual law students.

Spring Projects

We look forward to the spring semester with the Two-Year LL.M. program! We will be offering Fundamentals of Legal Writing II (a course that focuses on the scholarly writing genre), and Academic Legal English II (a course that engages students in experiential learning to enhance their oral communication skills, grammar skills, and professional language skills).

We also look forward to presenting at the TESOL International Convention and Expo in March 2025 in Long Beach, CA. We will be presenting theories and practices that will appear in our upcoming book.

Winter Break

We each plan to spend the holiday season with friends and loved ones. Professor Lake will travel to the Boston area, and Professor Weger will stay in Virginia. We wish you a healthy and restful winter break!

Ben Cheng

Prof. Cheng taught both Legal English I and Professional Responsibility during the fall. He is looking forward to teaching Legal English II as well as a new Negotiations course for LLM students for which he consulted with Barrie Roberts, founder of Mediation as a Second Language and author of The “Getting to Yes” Guide for ESL Students and Professionals.

John Dundon

Professor Dundon taught two very different, but closely related, courses this semester. The first was a section of U.S. Legal, Research, Analysis & Writing in the Two-Year LL.M. Program, a course which introduces our multilingual law students to the three very different tasks of performing U.S. legal research, creating legal arguments based on case law, and presenting this research and analysis in a polished legal memorandum that meets the expectations of a U.S. legal audience.

Professor Dundon also taught Introduction to the U.S. Legal System, a large survey class that included all students from the Two-Year LL.M. Program, as well as foreign-trained students in Georgetown Law’s general LL.M. program who wish to qualify for the New York bar exam. This class was designed to answer the broad and somewhat esoteric question of “How does the U.S. legal system work?” Rather than focusing on any particular area of substantive law, this class touched on the structure of the U.S. government and the limits of federal power, the tools that courts use to interpret statutes and prior case law, and the ways in which federal and state courts often must interpret the law of other jurisdictions (i.e., federal courts interpreting state law, and vice versa), among other topics.

As different as these courses may appear at first glance, they were intimately connected. Understanding how U.S. courts do their job is a necessary precondition to understanding the relative weight of sources of U.S. law and how these sources are used to make legal arguments. And understanding how U.S. lawyers craft their legal arguments, in turn, helps students anticipate what to look for when reading all of the cases that they have been assigned for homework in their various classes.

When he wasn’t teaching (or being a dad) this semester, Professor Dundon also completed and defended his dissertation proposal in furtherance of his doctoral studies in Georgetown’s Linguistics Department. The working title of Professor Dundon’s dissertation is Intertextuality and Metadiscourse in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, and his study will investigate how sources of law are linguistically positioned as having formal authority in oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Among his dissertation committee members is Professor Marta Baffy of the University of Baltimore School of Law, a former faculty director in the Two-Year LL.M. Program at Georgetown Law.

Finally, Professor Dundon had a research article published this fall in the Journal of Pragmatics: “I think Gray is just against you there”: Intertextuality and personification in legal discourse. This study explores how parties in Supreme Court oral arguments (both attorneys and Justices) tend to personify the names of prior cases and animate them with human traits such as emotions and the power of speech. In the article, Professor Dundon posits that this personification is an information-management tool occurring in sequences of oral arguments that are particularly dense with references to case law. This is a strand of research that he hopes to revisit, in part, in his dissertation.

Stephen Horowitz

Georgetown Law

*Finished teaching Legal English I to the Two-Year LLM Program students, for what looks like it may be the final time. The course focused on a line of torts cases on the topic of negligence and helped students understand how to read and think about common law cases in the US legal system, and also how to organize an outline, think about hypotheticals, and write exam answers using an IRAC approach that connects discourse to writing moves, and writing moves to the language and grammar needed to execute those writing moves.

*Taught a section of US Legal Research & Writing for the LLM students in the Two-Year LLM Program. In addition to teaching the process of legal research, focused in particular on the discourse, writing moves, and language needed to execute the writing moves and discourse of legal memorandum writing.

Ukraine

*In November, began serving as a Visiting Professor of Legal English at the Kyiv-Mohyla Law School for the purpose of providing faculty training and curriculum development support. (Special thanks to Justice For All Ukraine’s Artem Shaipov for facilitating the relationship!)

*Initiated and helped organize a November 25, 2024 joint event on the law school campus titled, “Insider Perspectives on Atrocity Crimes Accountability in Ukraine,” hosted by Georgetown Law’s International Criminal Justice Initiative and by Truth Hounds, an independent Ukrainian organization focused in investigating war crime atrocities committed by Russia against Ukraine. The panel featured ICJI’s Christopher “Kip” Hale, who has been advising Ukraine’s Prosecutor General on the investigation and prosecution of war atrocities, and Volodymyr Hryshko, Legal Counsel for Truth Hounds, and Vladaslav Chyryk, Investigator for Truth Hounds, and was moderated by Professor Alan Blakley, Visiting Professor, Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Faculty of Law.

*Expanded weekly Legal English Conversation Zoom sessions from Ukrainian law faculty to Ukrainian law students. Recruited over 300 Ukrainian law students and over 100 US law students (and a few French law students) to participate. Approximately 40 of the US law students volunteered to host weekly Legal English Conversation Zoom sessions for the Ukrainian law students modeled on how I facilitate the sessions with Ukrainian law and legal English faculty. (Here’s a post on the Georgetown Legal English Blog with more information about this initiative, plus sign-up links for anyone else who would like to volunteer.)

*Helped law faculty from State Tax National University and Oles Gonchar Dnipro National University identify and connect with US law faculty for the purpose of providing lectures to the Ukrainian law schools on the topics of Rule of Law, Cybersecurity, Criminal Law, Search & Seizure Law, Election Law, Democracy, Legislation Process, System of Checks & Balances, Artificial Intelligence Regulations, Anti-Corruption Regulations and Political Corruption Regulations, among others.

Sri Lanka

*Over the winter break, visited Sri Lanka to lead Training of Trainer (TOT) 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. Similar to Ukraine, in Sri Lanka law schools are in the process of moving towards English-language-only curriculum.

Afghanistan

*In December, continued conducting assessments for former 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).

*Also, with Daniel Edelson and USLawEssentials, continued offering a free self-guided online Pre-LLM legal English program (i.e., Fundamentals of the US Legal System + Reading Cases + Legal Writing + Legal Listening) to help Afghan candidates prepare to start an LLM program at a US law school.

Japan

*In October/November, 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.

Interestingly, the course came into existence at Keio thanks to a change in the date of the Japanese bar exam, which meant that students still have an additional semester of classes after they’ve completed the bar exam. As a result, there’s increased demand for Legal English among the students since they recognize the need for English and know that once they graduate and begin their legal training work, they will not have much time to study English. Special thanks to Profs. Masako Miyatake and Mindy Allen for the invite!

Assessment

*Thanks to a post on the Consortium on Graduate Communications (CGC) listserv, ended up piloting a new language assessment with a small cohort of Georgetown LLM students in collaboration with Sotiria Koui, founder of ELT Matters and creator of ALIGN Plus, “An online English language placement test for the academic needs of graduate students.”

Looking ahead to 2025….

*In the Spring 2025 semester, will be teaching Professional Responsibility for a section of LLM students, and Legal English II for the Two-Year LLM Program students. Legal English II will use as its primary materials a line of Criminal Procedure cases related to Miranda rights and help deepen their case reading and analysis skills.

*On January 15, 2025, will be the External Speaker for the European Legal English Teachers’ Association (EULETA) external speaker series event titled, “Legal English in US Law Schools: Meeting the needs of international LLM students.” [Click here for more information and to register for this event.]

*In June, 2025 will teach the Legal Writing course for the Southwestern Institute for International and Comparative Law’s annual Academy for international lawyers. This will be the 60th year of its Academy.

*Will start to develop new Online Legal English (OLE) courses to be made available to Georgetown Law students as well as to learners outside of Georgetown.

*Working on developing a Rule of Law legal English course, thanks to support and materials from University of Arkansas Law Professor Christopher Kelley.

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.

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!

Wordrake Plain Language Series: An Interview with Prof. Stephen Horowitz

In connection with International Plain Language Day (which is a real thing), Wordrake recently published an interview with Georgetown Legal English Prof. Stephen Horowitz, who teaches in Georgetown Law’s Two-Year LLM Program, in which they asked him questions such as:

“What prompted you to combine Law and English as a Second Language?”
“What connections do you see between writing for lawyers, linguistics, English as a Second Language, and the plain language movement? How do you see these fields working together to promote clarity and equity?”
“How can other lawyers help clients who speak English as a second language? What should lawyers know about ESL processing that would help them better serve clients?”
“How can professors help students who speak English as a second language?”

Below are some quotes from the interview:

“In Japan I encountered so many situations and behaviors that felt uncomfortable and at times even irrational. I learned to stop myself and consider the possibility that it actually was rational if you’re working from a different set of assumptions. And I learned to question and evaluate my own assumptions about how things should work before I fell back on a judgmental view or comment. It’s led me to a passionate curiosity for trying to understand why people do things they do.”
“The plain English movement is a reaction to a sense that the writing of lawyers and judges had become unnecessarily complicated and was acting as a barrier to access to justice. Although not stated explicitly, the plain English movement seems to me to assume native English speakers as its primary users and consumers. Legal English, on the other hand, is a catch-all term relating to the approach and curriculum for helping lawyers and law students from other language backgrounds study or work with US (or UK, Canadian, Australian, etc.) law or contracts in English.”
“The primary overlap [between Plain English and Legal English] is probably with regard to input. In the case of plain English, if you simplify language and use fewer words, then there is less information to process, both in volume and complexity. That should work to the benefit of non-native English speakers. In other words, using plain English makes a text closer to the idea of “comprehensible input.” Of course, it’s also possible that even a text that meets plain English standards could still be challenging for a non-native English speaker to understand for a variety of reasons, including vocabulary, grammar, and cultural knowledge gaps. And of course among non-native English speakers, there will also always be a wide range of facility with English.”
“However, it seems to me that plain English and legal English begin to diverge regarding output. This is because plain English can often be conveyed as a series of prescriptivist rules and principles for how to use and not use language. Whereas in legal English, the priority is generally learning to communicate one’s ideas accurately, with style a little lower down the priority list depending on the student. From a legal English teaching perspective, we want the students to learn to feel confident in expressing their ideas.”

Below is a link to the full interview.

Wordrake Plain Language Series: An Interview with Professor Stephen Horowitz

Updates from the Georgetown Legal English Faculty (September 2023)

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

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

Craig Hoffman

Professor Hoffman gave a talk at the U.S. Supreme Court in early August. He was invited by the Association of the Reporters of Judicial Decisions, whose annual meeting was held at the Supreme Court. He was asked to speak about Language and Law and specifically about his paper, Parse the Sentence First: Curbing the Urge to Resort to the Dictionary When Interpreting Legal Texts. (Additionally, he also managed to get the New York Reporter of Decisions to send him an opinion from a New York trial court that the Georgetown Law librarians had been seeking!)

Heather Weger

Prof. Weger with Georgetown Law alumni in front of Deoksugung Palace

Summer 2023 was packed with legal English endeavors! A highlight was meeting up with LL.M. and J.D. alumni during a visit to South Korea, generously hosted by Law Center alumnus, Chairman Seung-Hoon Lee .

The opportunity to connect with our multilingual community in a global setting affirms the legacy of the Georgetown experience. I was delighted to share insights about our Two-Year LL.M. program with these colleagues and welcome two of our incoming students.

Back in the U.S., I’ve been excitedly working on the release of the next issue of AL Forum, the Applied Linguistic Newsletter for TESOL, a publication I co-edit with Dr. Natalia Dolgova. This issue will explore the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), such as the emergent use of ChatGPT, on educational practices; it includes articles from Georgetown colleagues Professor Stephen Horowitz and Technology Specialist Ellery Boatright.

Research also found a way into the summer! Professor Julie Lake and I are collaborating on upcoming conference presentations and publications that focus on integrating asset-based pedagogical practices into Legal English education. As this busy summer wraps up, I look forward to an even busier school year!

Julie Lake

Professor Lake had a wonderful summer traveling around the U.S. with her husband and daughter. She spent a week at Cape May, NJ at the beach, a week in Chapel Hill, NC, and a week in Philadelphia, PA.

During her summer she made progress on her personal “language-based” summer project to learn Spanish. Language learning is a lifetime journey!

Professor Lake also spent time working with Professor 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.

And finally, Professor Lake enjoyed researching productive ways to use ChatGPT as a learning tool for law and linguistic students.

John Dundon

Professor Dundon began his summer by presenting at the Sixth International Language & Law Conference at the University of Bialystok Faculty of Law in Bialystok, Poland in June (see prior post).

He then taught a summer class, Introduction to U.S. Contract Drafting and Interpretation at IE University Law School in Madrid, Spain, where he has taught for the past three summers.

In July, Professor Dundon presented a paper, When multilingual litigants encounter monolingual ideologies in U.S. judicial opinions, at the Twelfth Bonn Applied Linguistics Conference in Bonn, Germany; he’s been invited back to Bonn to appear as a discussant in a conference focused on legal discourse, taking place in September (more on that in a future post).

He also traveled in Morocco, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with family, before returning to Georgetown to teach U.S. Legal Research, Analysis, and Writing as part of the LL.M. Summer Experience program.

Professor Dundon ended the summer with a presentation at Georgetown Law’s faculty summer research workshop, where he spoke about his paper “A shifting precipice of unsettled law?”: A survey of how U.S. courts treat expert testimony using forensic stylistics, which was published this month in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.

Yi Song

1. Summer Teaching

Professor Yi Song taught two courses during the Summer Experience – “Foundations for American Law” (co-teaching with Professor Michael Cedrone) and her summer stable, “U.S. Legal Research, Analysis and Writing.”

She’s especially proud of being responsible for the idea of the group assignment for the Foundations class.

In July 2023, 102 international lawyers from around the world walked into McDonough 203 as strangers.
They were asked to form 10 groups to present before class “What I have learned from the Foundations so far.”
In the subsequent 10 days, we saw history reenacted as Marbury v. Madison came alive.
Like most historic events, it all began with a fateful night at the bar.
The foundations of the American legal system were reimagined in the multiverse with the prompt “what if the Founding Fathers were_____?”
An uncanny Professor Cedrone Impersonator? A jury trial, where a top international model found herself in the midst of legal dramas? A tort case that occurred on the premises of Georgetown Law, inspired by the Office-style-behind-the-scene footage?
When Dean Treanor came in one morning for a surprise visit, Prof. Song regretted that she forgot to take a group class selfie with him. But the one she got with Professor Cedrone still came out pretty good.

2. Professor Song’s Master of Laws Interviews Project

Master of Laws Interviews Project has come to the classroom this summer. Season 2 is being recorded now. Stay tuned for the Fascinating journeys such as how a lawyer got hired and became the first shareholder with international background in a firm’s 137 year history; How a former star student from legal research and writing class successfully turned her externship into the international associate position at BigLaw. And more!

Michelle Ueland

I was an invited keynote speaker for this conference in Costa Rica (at a branch campus of my MA alma mater, la Universidad Nacional) on August 17 & 18. I gave two presentations (#1 and #2 below) and the closing plenary (#3).

1. “Advancing Listening and Speaking Skills in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Classrooms”

2. “In Your Voice and In Your Shoes: Experiencing Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play “English”

3. “What’s all the chatter about? Writing educators’ pedagogical responses to generative artificial intelligence (AI) products like ChatGPT-3.5”

Mari Sakai

I presented at the Global Legal Skills Conference at Nottingham Law School at Nottingham Trent University, England (July 30-Aug 1, 2023). My presentation was titled “Addressing international law students’ pronunciation needs: Best-practices informed by linguistics research and pedagogy.”

Abstract

Although professors notice issues in their international students’ speech, they may not feel equipped to address them. This presentation will cover four research-based, best practices for teaching second language (L2) pronunciation: orienting towards intelligibility, creating task-based lessons, increasing talk-time, and giving feedback.
Many L2 speakers express a desire to “eliminate their accents”, however, accents carry valuable information of our diverse identities and experiences. Teachers can instead help students reorient towards the crucial feature of communication called intelligibility, which asks if the listener received the message the speaker intended to convey. Oral skills can then be addressed through task-based teaching, which focuses on tasks students face (e.g., oral case briefs, negotiations) and guides them through the language necessary to complete them. Third, increasing the amount of productive (versus receptive) interactions in the target language will help students to see progress more rapidly. One suggestion is assigning a video reflection after observing courtroom proceedings. Finally, explicit pronunciation feedback can be a salient tool for progress. Feedback can focus on unintelligible speech, articulation of a sound, and spoken grammar.
These four approaches can be applied in any classroom around the world. Digital access to all teaching materials will be provided.

Shuguftah Quddoos, the first Asian woman to serve as the Sheriff of Nottingham

Also,….

A fun tidbit about the city was that it is the birth place of the Robin Hood lore, and there is actually a real Sheriff of Nottingham position (from what I learned, it’s apparently similar to Mayor).
The current Sheriff is the first Asian woman to hold the position, and we learned from her that all the city buses and trams are electric vehicles too.
GLS was a great small conference, and next year it will be in Bari, Italy!

Stephen Horowitz

*Collaborated with a USAID Ukrainian representative to establish online legal English training programs for Ukrainian law faculty starting in Fall 2023. The effort has involved identifying interested US legal English instructors and matching their areas of expertise with the interests of Ukrainian law faculty.

*Set up assessments (pro bono) for female judges from Afghanistan preparing to enter LLM programs at US law schools. The project, which involved collaboration with Prof. Daniel Edelson (Seton Hall/USLawEssentials.com) and Prof. Lindsey Kurtz (Penn State Law), was at the request of an ABA initiative working to mentor and support female Afghan judges.

*Taught a 4-week online Bar Exam Essay Writing for LLM Students course during May/June, in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Edelson. The mission (and experiment) was to make the course accessible to any LLM or non-native English speaking law student, regardless of ability to pay, and it worked well. A second section of the course had to be created to accommodate excessive demand.

*Released a USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast interview with Seongryol Ryan Park, a graduate of Georgetown Law’s National Security Law LLM program, who previously worked for South Korea’s Ministry of Unification and now serves as Assistant Secretary to the President for International Public Relations.

*Set up the Tax Legal English Resources page on the Georgetown Legal English Blog.

*Wrote a soon-to-be published article abou for AL Forum, the Applied Linguistic Newsletter for TESOL, about using ChatGPT to create tax vocabulary practice activities.

*Invited to guest lecture (via Zoom) for a legal English course at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan during the fall 2023 semester.

*Had the opportunity to meet visiting scholar Professor Anna Yan, who teaches law at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and show her the new Legal English faculty offices in McDonough 477.

*Sadly was unable to attend the Global Legal Skills Conference in Nottingham, UK, July 30-Aug 1, which some attendees have shared was really fantastic. But hoping to attend the 2024 GLS Conference in Barri, Italy.

*Fortunate to have had a family vacation in July in a small town (Puerto Morelos) on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which was a very positive linguistic experience and first time out of the US for my children.

Analyzing ChatGPT’s use of cohesive devices to help international LLM students improve cohesion in their writing

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English, with special thanks to Prof. Julie Lake and Prof. Heather Weger for their time and linguistics expertise in analyzing and discussing the texts and editing this post, which is far more cohesive because of them.

Hot on the heels of my recent experiment to try and better understand ChatGPT’s view of improving language and grammar (See “Analyzing ChatGPT’s ability as a grammar fixer,” 2/23/23), I was grading my students’ timed midterm exams and noticed a paragraph in one students’ answer that had all the right pieces but decidedly lacked cohesion.

“….the biggest takeaway of all for this experiment…..ChatGPT can help instructors identify the kinds of cohesive devices that a student is not using and then support the student in learning to use and become more comfortable and familiar with those cohesive devices.”

So I mentioned this in a comment and gave some suggestions as to how to improve the cohesion in the paragraph. And then I had a thought:

Maybe ChatGPT can help!

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: “Finding the right voice(s): An engagement analysis of L2 writers in hypothetical legal writing”

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

I’m very happy to share a link to an article titled “Finding the right voice(s): An engagement analysis of L2 writers in hypothetical legal writing” by Professor Yiran Xu of University of California Merced , who completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown in 2020. The article–which was Professor Xu’s dissertation project–is based on her analysis of the writing of several students who were in the Georgetown 2-Year LLM Program at the time.

Here are the highlights followed by the abstract from ScienceDirect. Click the link to see the full article, which is available for free. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898589822001280

Highlights

L2 legal writers who spoke the same first language and had similar initial proficiency followed distinct developmental paths.
L2 writers who improved could maintain a consistent position, integrate supporting evidence, and engage with counterarguments.
L2 writers who did not improve had difficulty maintaining a consistent legal voice.
For some L2 legal writers, model essays helped them explore and expand the use of Engagement resources.
The system of Engagement is a useful tool to understand L2 legal writers’ linguistic choices as they learn a legal genre.

Abstract

This longitudinal case study tracks the development of four second language (L2) writers’ skills in hypothetical legal writing in a year-long legal language program. Drawing on the system of Engagement from systemic functional linguistics, the study analyzes how L2 writers engaged different legal voices and advanced their arguments via three discursive strategies: dialogic expansion, contraction, and justification. An examination of the Engagement resources the writers deployed in 32 essays illustrates their diverse developmental paths and highlights the linguistic choices that reflect the variation in their development. I discuss the influence of initial L2 proficiency and model essays on L2 writers’ trajectories and the distinct challenges these writers faced in maintaining a consistent argumentative position. I argue that the system of Engagement is a useful analytical framework for understanding the linguistic choices L2 legal writers make as they work toward the communicative goals of the target legal genre.

Podcast: Multilingual Lawyer interview with Georgetown legal writing professors

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Here is the latest podcast episode of the Multilingual Lawyer series for the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast, in which I interviewed Georgetown Law legal writing professors Eun Hee Han and Jonah Perlin.

Here’s the write-up from the show notes:

Prof. Eun Hee Han

The USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast continues its series of interviews with multilingual lawyers as Stephen Horowitz interviews Professors Jonah Perlin and Eun Hee Han.

This is a fascinating discussion among three professors at Georgetown University Law Centre. Jonah and Eun Hee are Legal Practice professors, meaning they teach legal writing, but they also both have significant experience working with international students in Georgetown’s JD program.

Prof. Jonah Perlin

Whether you are a student or instructor you will find this to be an inspiring interview. Jonah and Eun Hee have fascinating backgrounds and their dedication to their students and love for teaching make this an enlightening chat.

Among other things, Eun Hee has previously been co-chair of the Legal Research & Writing Diversity Committee for the Association of American Law Schools. She is currently on the Editorial Board for the Asian Journal of Legal Education and a member of the Asian Pacific American Legal Writing Professors Collective.

Jonah is also a graduate of Georgetown Law and did his undergraduate degree at Princeton University where he majored in religious studies. He has worked as a litigator at the law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington DC and also clerked for federal appeals court Judge Robert A. Katzman of the 2nd Circuit and for Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the US District Court for Washington, DC.

And Jonah is the founder of the very successful and influential HowILawyer Podcast in which he interviews different lawyers about how they practice law.