Teaching

Yesterday I saw the following tweet by Abigail Pathoff (aka @APathoff), legal-writing professor at Chapman University Fowler School of Law: @WisconsinLaw prof Andrew Turner: Sure You Can! Teaching a 2L/3L Transactional Drafting Course without Experience as a Transactional Lawyer. pic.twitter.com/UYi9qT6HLL — Abigail Patthoff (@APatthoff) November 30, 2018 Do you need transactional experience to teach contract drafting? I’ll start by acknowledging that … Read More

At my recent “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Portland, Oregon, I met David Hill. Dave teaches contract drafting at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, so we chatted about what he does. By email, he followed up with some thoughts about how he uses A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting as part of his course: I designed … Read More

I have a mixed relationship with the law-school world. On the one hand, an increasing number of instructors use MSCD as a course text. On the other hand, people from law schools are among the most ardent defenders of traditional contract language that I have encountered. So I was interested to see this post on ContractsProf Blog by Nancy Kim, … Read More

This August I’ll be at Notre Dame Law School again, teaching a three-week intensive course in contract drafting. As always, the course will feature a series of written assignments. The first assignment is gentle, to ease my students into the subject. The scenario is that a senior lawyer asks a junior lawyer to revise a given draft to reflect a new deal term. I … Read More

Go here for my interview on Scholastica Blog about my recent course at Notre Dame Law School.

I made it a point to have outside lawyers play a part in my course at Notre Dame Law School. I don’t know from pedagogy, so not a lot of forethought went into that decision. I simply figured that I should try to give my students a glimpse of the role of contract drafting in the larger world, rather than just the … Read More

I noticed this post last week on ContractsProf Blog. It’s about an online contract-drafting exercise developed by Zev Eigen of Northwestern Law School. It appears that the software pairs students who then negotiate and draft contracts for an employment relationship, based on a term sheet they’re provided. ContractsProf Blog offers little detail, and Professor Eigen prefers it that way. Here’s the … Read More

During my visit to the biennial conference of the Legal Writing Institute, I saw that although their focus remains litigation writing, an increasing number of their members teach contract drafting, or would like to. I was also reminded that the Association of American Law Schools has a Section on Transactional Law and Skills. So if an organization serves to promote … Read More

In the Broadway musical “The Music Man,” “Professor” Harold Hill poses as a boys’ band organizer and leader. He sells band instruments and uniforms to naive Iowa townsfolk, promising to train the members of a new band. But Harold is a no musician, and he plans to skip town once the instruments and uniforms are paid for. Instead of giving music lessons, … Read More