Online Legal English – Georgetown Legal English Blog

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….

****************

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

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

**************************

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

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

Georgetown Legal English at the 2023 ILEAC Annual Conference

Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

Yesterday, Day 1 of the annual International Legal Education Abroad and LLM Administrators’ Conference hosted by American University Washington College of Law, Georgetown Law was represented on three different panels.

1. Craig Hoffman, founder of Georgetown Law’s 2-Year LLM Program (the first such program to exist), participated in a panel discussion titled “The Emergence of the Two-Year LLM: A Promising Alternative for Non-JD Law Programs” together with Ashley Sim (USC), Gabrielle Goodwin (Indiana University), and Rebecca Pendleton (Boston University.) The discussion, moderated by Prof. Pendleton, addressed the benefits and challenges of 2-Year LLM programs as well as changes over time.

2. Andrea Rodriguez Escobedo, Director of LLM Programs at Georgetown Law, presented on “Higher bar passage rate to attract more LL.M candidates: How can Law Schools help LL.M students pass a bar examination in the US?” A former Columbia LLM student herself, Andrea shared her and others’ research on LLM bar success and delved into the possible causes as well as potential solutions for support.

3. Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English at Georgetown Law, together with Daniel Edelson, Director of Academic Success at Seton Hall Law and founder of USLawEssentials, gave a presentation titled “Some new-ish thoughts on post-pandemic Online Legal English (OLE.)” In it, we shared some examples of OLE content from the Georgetown Online Legal English course as well as from the St. John’s Law OLE course and the USLawEssentials’ OLE courses.

In particular, we focused on an approach we’ve been using called the “interactive textbook” model, which is a term we created to capture the feel of an asynchronous course that is set up sequentially and can be used as a self-guided course, but can also just as easily function as the text for an instructor-led course.

Online legal English for students from politically disrupted countries

Post by Prof. Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English

One silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic has been increased accessibility and acceptability of online education. And one area this has already provided great benefit in the field of legal English is with online legal English education for students from politically disrupted countries.

Example 1: Female judges fleeing from Afghanistan

I learned this in Spring of 2022 when I was collaborating with Prof. Daniel Edelson of Seton Hall Law School (Daniel is a former legal English colleague from St. John’s Law and founder of USLawEssentials.com) on the creation of an online legal English legal writing course to be offered to foreign-educated attorneys in May/June 2022. As we started to make people aware of the course–which we originally anticipated would be of interest to foreign-educated attorneys preparing for the summer bar exam and/or preparing to start an LLM program in the fall–we were contacted by the Alliance for International Women’s Rights (AIWR) which, among other activities, had been running a mentoring program that matched US lawyers and judges with female judges in Afghanistan prior to the US military withdrawal.

Things I’m trying in our first-ever self-paced, asynchronous legal English course

Stephen Horowitz is the Director of Online Legal English Programs at Georgetown Law.

Since I started my new position at Georgetown Law in January, 2020 (just a couple months before the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon us), my primary focus has been developing a self-paced, asynchronous online legal English course. It’s been an exciting learning and creative experience, and the course now happily exists!

It’s called OLE: Orientation to the U.S. Legal System (though we have also created another iteration with the perhaps more literally descriptive title OLE: U.S. Legal System – Core Concepts & Vocabulary), and though it felt like this day would never arrive, I’ve now actually begun teaching it. (Note: OLE = Online Legal English)

Of course, I’m not teaching in the traditional sense. I’m not in a classroom and I don’t even have any lesson plans. All of that is embedded into the self-paced, do-it-yourself course. The course is set up so that students essentially work through it on their own, with various activities due each day and a final graded writing assignment due at the end of each week. The only synchronous component is are one or two Zoom office hour sessions each week that provide a chance for students to ask questions and discuss anything they want, and for all of us to get to know each other better. It’s this sort of “flipped classroom” model in an online, asynchronous set-up that I’ve never done before. And that I think has not yet been done in the legal English world. (And by the way, if I’m wrong, please don’t hesitate to let me know.)