Checklists Redux

I posted before about Jennifer Murphy Romig's guest blog in the “Project Management for Lawyers” series on Think Like a Lawyer. The final installment was posted yesterday. Enjoy! 

1. Checklists for Legal Writing
2. Using Checklists for Writing Particular Types of Legal Documents
3. Checklists for the Process of Legal Writing: Thinking Outside the Box and Aristotle on an App
4. Checklists for Legal Writing: Writing in Teams

New Resource: International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse

In the event you are not aware of it already, I'd like to introduce the International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse. You will need to register (free) at the site to access most of the articles, but I promise it's worth it. 

The International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural peer-reviewed scholarly journal, integrating academic areas of law, linguistics, discourse analysis, psychology and sociology, presenting articles related to legal issues, review of cases, comments and opinions on legal cases and serving as a practical resource for lawyers, judges, legislators, applied linguists, discourse analysts and those academics who teach the future legal generations.

In particular, I found Craig Hoffman's article, "Using Discourse Analysis Methodology to Teach 'Legal English,'" to be relevant and quite interesting.  

Professor Hoffman describes a class he developed and teaches in the LL.M. program at Georgetown University Law Center called United States Legal Discourse.  He gives the why and how of developing a new approach to teaching legal writing to international students, including the syllabus for a one-semester course. When designing the course, Professor Hoffman found that international LL.M. students' "unfamiliarity with the English language was much less problematic than their unfamiliarity with our federal common law legal system and the conventions of U.S. Legal Discourse." As a linguist-lawyer, I think this makes a lot of sense. 

Craig Hoffman, Using Discourse Analysis Methodology to Teach “Legal English”, Int'l J.L. Lang. & Discourse, Sept. 2011, at 1-19.  

Guest Post: Book Review

Donna Bain Butler of American University's Washington College of Law offers her very thorough and well-written book review of Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis by Diane Pecorari. As Professor Bain Butler noted to me in an email, the book "gives insight into plagiarism: a topic not clearly understood, especially when it comes to international LL.M. academic writers."

I appreciate Professor Bain Butler's thoughtful evaluation of the Pecorari text, and I appreciate her bringing the text to my attention, especially the concept of "patchwriting as a stage in the process of acquiring academic literacy." More on this in a later post.

To access the book review, please click on the link below:

Bain Butler, D. (2011). Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis. [Review of the book  Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis]. Retrieved May 24, 2011 from LINGUIST List database http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-2179.html