Legal Research and Writing Back in the Day
Can you imagine law school with no Legal Writing class? Before some of you start cheering, can you imagine working at a law firm with no prior instruction on how to write a memo, brief or pleading? Before the late 1940s, legal writing classes did not exist. New attorneys had to pick up practical writing skills on the job.
Legal writing classes sprung up in the late 1940s and early 1950s because of a perceived need to help GI Bill students with writing skills. To read more about the history of legal writing programs, see Acknowledging Our Roots: Setting the Stage for the Legal Writing Institute, Karin Mika, The Second Draft, Spring 2010, p. 4-6.
What started as a remedial program became an essential part of the law school curriculum by the late 1980s. The ABA’s 1992 MacCrate report emphasized the need for legal writing instruction by including communication, research, and legal analysis among the 10 essential skills for lawyers. More recently, the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, San Francisco : Jossey-Bass/Wiley, KF272 .E38 2007 , emphasized practical skills and combining theoretical and practical instruction. The Carnegie Report recognized legal writing as a way to conduct simulated practice. Id. at 106. Also see Executive Summary of the Carnegie Report.
Legal research instruction has a longer history. The earliest legal research courses started around 1915. More schools started offering legal research courses due to demand by students and a push from legal publishers. See Joyce Manna Janto & Lucinda D. Harrison-Cox, Teaching Legal Research: Past and Present, 84 Law Libr. J. 281, 282-89 (1992). While many of these classes concentrated on bibliography, ie. the contents of books, other classes emphasized where and how to find the law and how to use decisions and statutes. See Marjorie Dick Rombauer, Comment, First-Year Legal Research and Writing: Then and Now, 25 J. Legal Educ. 538 (1973). The bibliographic method was more popular, with interpretation and legal reasoning relegated to a separate class called Legal Methods. Id.
In the 1980s, research, reasoning and writing skills were combined into the Legal Writing classes we are familiar with today. Nowadays, the majority of law schools also offer advanced legal research classes. See Matthew C. Cordon, Beyond Mere Competency: Advanced Legal Research in a Practice-Oriented Curriculum, 55 Baylor L. Rev. 1, fn. 1 (2003). Advanced legal research classes are of increasing importance, as law firms expect students to arrive with the necessary skills. In today’s economy, law firm clients do not want to pay for inefficient work or for the training of new attorneys.
Law school libraries date back over 100 years before the first legal research classes. Library collections have changed a great deal since those times, particularly due to computer databases and the Internet. For more about the history of law school libraries, see The History of Law School Libraries in the United States : from Laboratory to Cyberspace, Glen-Peter Ahlers, Sr, Z675.L2 A38 2002, Margaret Christianson and Christopher Knott, Milestones in Academic Law Libraries , 9 AALL Spectrum 10 (2004-2005).
