Global Legal Skills Conference 2013 in Costa Rica

The 8th Global Legal Skills Conference was held in San Jose, Costa Rica, March 11-13. What a great conference! Presentations included an amazing array of topics, including the following (just to name a few): 

• The Importance of Teaching International Students to Read Before Teaching Them How to Write
• Academic Legal Writing
• Creating Collaborations: Connecting the Law School Writing Center to the International Human Rights Clinic
• Technology in the Classroom
• How Gender and Cross-Cultural Communication Can Enhance or Interfere with Global Legal Skills
• Incorporating Field Trips to Teach the U.S. Legal System
• International Legal Research
• Introduction to Law and Legal Education in Costa Rica and Central America

As part of the conference, we had the opportunity to visit the Supreme Court of Costa Rica, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the U.S. Embassy. Some of us also had the opportunity to travel in Costa Rica before or after the conference, which was fantastic and a welcome respite (for me) from the winter weather of the Midwest. 

My presentation "Patch Writing: Plagiarism or Part of the Writing Process?" discussed the difficulties of paraphrasing from sources, especially for international students, and how to deal with too much borrowing of the original language as part of the writing pedagogy, rather than as a practice to be condemned. I'd be happy to share my presentation PowerPoint and/or sources if anyone is interested. 

I plan to write a longer, more in-depth, post on patch writing in the near future, but until then, Professor Rebecca Moore Howard of Syracuse University provides a nice bibliography on her website: http://www.rebeccamoorehoward.com/bibliographies/patchwriting.