Curriculum Guide · Curriculum

Georgetown considers legal scholarship and writing essential to professional excellence and offers many opportunities for students to develop their abilities in this area.

Introductory Course
The first-year required course introduces students to federalism and its effect on writing. Students explore research tools and their complex interrelationships, which are spawned by federalism. Students analyze legal issues and develop research strategies tailored to those issues, using federal and state codes, digests, secondary sources, loose leafs, legislative histories, administrative sources, CD ROMs, and on-line sources. Students then synthesize those sources into a written analysis, following a process that calls for research reports, outlines where appropriate, drafts, and final versions. The course uses the opinion letter, the memorandum, and the brief as analytical genres, teaching expository writing in the first semester and persuasion in the second. The course thus introduces students generally to the legal discourse community, including its analytical paradigms and register.

Advanced Writing Courses
In addition to legal writing seminars in substantive areas, a number of advanced courses specifically advance the student’s initiation into the legal discourse community. The Advanced Legal Writing Seminar, taught by Professor Fran DeLaurentis, carries students into practice. The course requires students to research and write contracts, an opinion letter, memos, briefs, and statutes. Students also collaborate on at least one project, analyzing how the legal writing process adjusts accordingly. Students see how the rhetorical questions of purpose, audience, scope, and stance affect all legal documents.

Students in the Law Fellow Program study the theory of teaching legal writing in the five-credit, two-semester Legal Writing Seminar: Theory and Practice for Law Fellows. They explore notions from composition theory, linguistics, and cognitive psychology by doing a series of readings. They transfer these theories to practice by preparing and teaching workshops, commenting on student papers, holding conferences with students, and working individually with selected students. They also write a bench memo in the spring semester. All work is done under the close supervision of the legal writing professor.

Senior Writing Fellows study the theory of teaching scholarly writing under Professor DeLaurentis. In the three-credit course Applied Legal Composition, they read extensively about writing theory and its application to scholarly legal writing. They explore more complicated matters of style, ESL (English as a Second Language) learning, scholarly research, and topic development. They work individually with students through conferences at the Writing Center.

Advanced Legal Research

Other advanced legal research seminars help students build on skills learned in the first year and focus on legal scholarship of particular fields.

Legal Research Skills for Practice reinforces the skills learned in the first-year Legal Research and Writing course.

Advanced Legal Research focuses on extensive research problems requiring the use of print materials, Lexis, Westlaw, and the internet. The course goes beyond topics covered in the first year course and emphasizes research tools and techniques used in practice.

Law Firm Research Seminar requires students to engage in a semester-long project based on an existing federal trial court case of their own choosing. The course focuses on research issues that lawyers encounter in practice and explores sources and strategies to support efficient and effective research management.

Seminar Research Methods focuses on research across a range of disciplines and sources and helps students find and improve their own research styles.

Legal Research in International and Comparative Law: Sources and Strategies, a two-credit course, addresses research methods and sources for international and foreign legal research. As a final project, students prepare a research guide on an international law topic or international organization.

Supervised Research

Students who want to write in a field of interest not covered by a seminar might consider undertaking a research project under the supervision of a faculty member. Students may earn two credits by researching and writing a paper on an approved topic. To sign up for supervised research, students must fill out a form available at the Office of the Registrar by the end of the Add/Drop period in the semester for which the credits are requested. If there is no full-time faculty member available in the specific area, students may propose a project with an adjunct professor. Supervised research requests are reviewed by the Chair of the Faculty/Student Committee on Legal Research and Writing.

Faculty who teach in the various curriculum areas are listed at the end of each curriculum essay. The Faculty Research Register, available at the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library, lists the research interests of members of the full-time faculty. Information about J.D. adjunct professors can be obtained by contacting Assistant Dean Sarah Hulsey.

Related Courses
All of Georgetown’s clinics offer legal writing opportunities, from appellate briefs in the Appellate Litigation Clinic to statutes in the Legislation Clinic. Students gain a sharper sense of audience by interacting with clients in some clinics, arguing before judges in others, and working with supervising attorneys in all.

The Writing Center The Writing Center provides J.D. and graduate students with assistance on writing projects. Senior Writing Fellows at the Center provide feedback on the following: making the transition from another field of expertise, such as engineering or history, to legal discourse; approaching scholarly writing as a specific genre with defined scope, purpose, audience, substance, and technical concerns; using legal substance to organize writing effectively and to make argumentative decisions; improving legal writing by understanding it as a specific process performed under time pressure in practical and academic legal settings, using computer technology and word processing to improve legal research and writing; paying proper attention to legal citation form and footnotes in text; connecting substance to syntax; mastering English grammar; and overcoming writer’s block.

Full-time Faculty:
Sonya Bonneau
Michael J. Cedrone
Frances C. DeLaurentis
Diana Donahoe
Vicki W. Girard
Michael Golden
Craig Hoffman
Julie Ross
Jeffrey Shulman
Rima Sirota
Kristen Tiscione