Storytelling in Appellate Brief Writing

2566241384_4264b1f0f3At the end of July, both Professor Michael Smith and I attended the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.  The conference was entitled “Chapter 2:  Once Upon a Legal Story” and focused on storytelling in “ways that will directly and tangibly benefit law students (i.e. future lawyers) and legal practitioners (i.e. former law students).”  The presentations I attended addressed ways to use storytelling to create a stronger narrative theme in a case and how to handle the ethical issues in storytelling.

One of the most intriguing presentations was Professor Kenneth Chestek’s talk “Judging by the Numbers:  an Empirical Study of the Power of Story.”  Professor Chestek conducted a study where he wrote four fictional test briefs:  two that focused heavily on stating the law and applying it (the “pure logos” briefs), and two that focused on creating a narrative story into which the law was inserted and applied (the “story” briefs).  (He wrote a logos brief and a story brief for both the petitioner and respondent.)  Professor Chestek solicited appellate practitioners, appellate judges, appellate judicial law clerks, appellate court staff attorneys, and legal writing professors to read these briefs and rate their strength of persuasion.  The participants knew they were taking part in a study, but they did not know who was conducting the study or what the purpose of the study was.

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I Am the Author

walrusYour faithful blog committee moderates posts and comments on  a rotating basis.  I was  “on call” on Tuesday evening and, returning home in despair after a night at Miller Park,  inadvertently published posts by Professors Greipp and Papke under my own name. The mistake was fixed in the morning.

But I found the latter error intriguing. Here I was, ostensibly the “author” of a post regretting “dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.” It was as if someone had replaced my bedside Edmund Burke with Jean-Paul Sartre.

But here’s the thing. I do agree – in a sense – with David’s point.

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The Importance of Student Organizations

sl0012Student organizations enrich a law student’s experience.  Whether it is bringing in practitioners to discuss the practice of law or bringing in scholars to debate important legal issues, student organizations—and the events they sponsor—help law students think about the law.  To be successful and to produce successful lawyers, a law school should encourage students to think about the law outside the classroom.  It is outside the classroom where a student may pursue the law in more depth and choose a topic that is important and interesting to him or her.

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