Editor’s Note

Welcome to Volume 30 of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute. A milestone anniversary offers a natural opportunity to take stock, perhaps especially when it coincides with a transformation of the way lawyers, students, and professors create legal documents, course materials, and even academic publications.^[1] On behalf of the Editorial Board, I am thrilled to share four articles (three on pedagogy and one that introduces a readability score for adjudicative decisions) that are both timely and timeless; four essays that reflect on continuity and change in legal writing; and five essays from Editors in Chief of past and future volumes.

Articles

Volume 30 opens with Katrina Robinson’s Invigorating Conferencing, for which she won the Legal Writing Institute’s Emerging Scholar Award. Robinson synthesizes and critiques three decades of scholarship on the professor-student conferences that have become a cornerstone of legal writing pedagogy. She argues that publications about “live critiquing” techniques deserve greater attention. Robinson concludes that the conferencing pedagogy canon offers wisdom and concrete pointers as law professors grapple with the new and constantly evolving realities presented by generative AI.

The need to adapt to the generative AI era takes center stage in Martin McKown’s “Check-Ride for Legal Writers”: Using Aviation Pedagogy to Rethink Assessment in the Age of Generative AI. Focusing on assessment, McKown advocates for adding scenario-based oral exams to the first-year legal writing curriculum. The “check-ride” exam in the aviation industry, which had to rethink how to train and assess pilots after the introduction of autopilot, provides a valuable model.

In The Magic of Mistakes in Promoting Learning in the Legal Writing Classroom, Diana Simon tackles an always salient dilemma in legal education: How can law professors make space for errors in a pressure-cooker environment that instills anxiety about mistakes? After examining the extensive cognitive science on learning from errors, grit, and growth mindset, Simon offers strategies professors can use to create a legal writing classroom that embraces mistakes as a valuable teaching and learning tool.

The last article, Mike Madden’s How Understandable Are Adjudicative Decisions? Introducing and Applying Law’s Own Readability Formula, presents groundbreaking empirical research. Building on work done by linguists in other contexts, Madden introduces MADRS; the first readability score designed to measure the understandability of adjudicative decisions. After explaining the process and choices that led to MADRS’s final form, Madden applies the formula to a database of opinions from the Supreme Court of Canada published in 2022. We are proud to publish this exciting article and hope, along with Madden, that it will prove to be a solid foundation for future research.

Themed Essays

Our call for submissions for Volume 30 included an invitation to submit essays on the theme “The Past, Present, and Future of Legal Writing.” The review process yielded four essays that engage with this theme in very different ways.

In Speeding Toward the Inevitable: More Thoughts on the Case for the Singular They in Formal Legal Writing, Jennifer Arlin contends that the use of the singular they to refer to a person whose identity is known (as opposed to a nonspecific person) is a significant linguistic and social change. Earlier accounts underestimate the magnitude of the change, which has triggered backlash in the form of statutes that are hostile to the use of pronouns that don’t correspond to the gender assigned at birth. Arlin offers guidance on how to navigate this situation until use of the singular they in formal legal writing gains widespread acceptance.

Donna L. Eng and Margie Alsbrook address a change, long underway but sped up by the rapid rise of generative AI, to the way lawyers and students “create” citations. As suggested by the first part of their essay’s title, From Builders to Editors: Reimagining How We Teach Citation in the AI Era, legal writers increasingly don’t build citations from scratch. Rather, they retrieve them from electronic databases or have generative AI generate them. Eng and Alsbrook argue that legal writing professors must catch up by adopting an “editing” approach when teaching citation.

Amanda Elyse calls for critical reflection on what we teach. She urges her fellow legal writing professors to add something that is too often missing from the entire 1L curriculum: mass incarceration. In Reality Check: Mass Incarceration and Teaching Lawyering Skills, Elyse documents this void and asserts that the legal writing course is an appropriate place to address the subject. Mass incarceration directly or indirectly affects many of our students’ future clients, and its specter has consequences for counseling and representation even outside the criminal law context. Elyse describes how she incorporates mass incarceration, and the voices of those who have been subjected to it, into her own classes.

Sometimes, change means regression. In Uniform, Supervised Programs: A Step Backwards for Legal Writing, Ben L. Fernandez describes his experiences in a program that reverted from an autonomous to a supervised model. He contends that this development effectively reduces professors who teach the first-year legal writing course to glorified teaching assistants. Fernandez shares thoughts on what individual professors can do to address some of the reasons why institutions continue to single out legal writing faculty for unfavorable treatment.

Essays from EICs

To mark the Volume 30 milestone, the Essay Editors invited several former EICs to write essays reflecting on the journal.^[2] The resulting collection opens with reflections on Legal Writing’s origins by founding editor J. Christopher Rideout, who was the journal’s EIC for Volumes 1–2 and continued to serve on the Editorial Board of several more volumes. We are grateful to Rideout and the other former EICs, whose contributions to the journal reach far beyond their EIC terms: Kristin Gerdy Kyle (EIC of Volumes 15–18); Brooke J. Bowman (EIC of Volumes 19–21); and Karen J. Sneddon (EIC of volumes 22–23). The last essay in this collection is written by incoming EIC Andrele Brutus St. Val. She is a talented scholar, editor, and leader, and I can’t wait to see how the journal will grow under her leadership.

One recurring theme in the EICs’ essays is the role Legal Writing has played not only in developing scholarship but also in sustaining a scholarly community. For Volume 30, the inner circle of this community includes the authors, whose articles and essays continue to set high standards; the Editorial Board members, who reviewed a large volume of submissions with a great amount of care and led the charge on editing the accepted articles and essays; and more than twenty Assistant Editors, who played a critical role in ensuring that each publication is as strong as it can be. Of course, the community is completed by our readers, who we hope will engage with the publications in this Volume for years and even decades to come.

Please join me and the rest of the Editorial Board in celebrating Legal Writing’s rich history and promising future.

Irene Ten Cate
Editor in Chief
Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute