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Abstract:
Do first year legal writing programs really prepare law students for the rigors of practice writing? This article begins to answer this question based on attorney and judge survey results, as well as interviews with judges who had also read student work in preparation for their interview. We found that while legal writing programs do provide a good foundation for legal writing skills, improvement can be made. Important changes that we have made at Pierce Law include shorter, more frequent assignments, variation/flexibility in choice of organizational paradigm, understanding the difference between settled and unsettled areas of law, and increased emphasis on grammar, punctuation, and style.

legal writing, legal analysis, legal eduction

Abstract:
Sensationalized cases increasingly create the context for public policy discussion. Stories about violent crime are a common feature of the local evening news and their emotional nature can often create the hook politicians need to showcase their “tough on crime” agendas. Often anecdotal and lurid, stories of criminal misdeeds are widely used to convince the public of a need to create or change laws.

This article demonstrates the perils of making law by extrapolating from a few random, albeit attention-grabbing, events. Specifically, the article examines the impact of a 1995 change in New Hampshire state law that lowered the age that a youth could be charged as an adult from 18 to 17. The law was passed in the wake of two isolated but brutal juvenile murders with little examination of the empirical data. To demonstrate the counter-productive and perhaps damaging nature of this approach to governance I review juvenile crime rate statistics for the period in question, but it is my view that the impact of the data alone can be significantly enhanced by examining specific instances of the law’s effect.

If media stories are used to justify legislative actions, then the stories of those affected by the actions should similarly be useful in deciding if the change is warranted. I will therefore go beyond the data and recount the story of Justin B., a young man whose arrest for simple underage drinking began a Kafka-esque descent into legal limbo and incarceration. This article shows that in New Hampshire, as in states all over the country, the statutory change was an over-reaction prompted by sensationalized and anecdotal evidence. By looking at the events and influences that inspired New Hampshire’s legislative changes, the consequences of the new law, and the effects it had on Justin B.’s life, I show that the law not only fell far short of its intended goals, but possibly made the citizens of New Hampshire less safe and at greater cost.

juvenile, justice, policy, lawmaking, crime

Abstract:
This article describes how I discovered the power of story as a tool to inspire scholarship. We think of stories as a means to bring life to legal cases in a way that grounds them and makes them visceral and comprehensible. We use storytelling to teach our students - showing how the emotive power of a story can persuade. However, stories can also serve a different function. In my search for a way to inspire and sustain my own writing, I found out that a good story can be the source of a writer’s motivation to both create and sustain scholarship. Basing scholarship on a story essentially mimics the process that has been occurring all along in the formation of law. The common law develops and changes as new stories push the limits of existing rules. Thus, stories are natural and logical fodder for scholarship about current trends and doctrines.

scholarship, narrative,storytelling