“One of the lines I like to use is, ‘Legal writing is not about grammar any more than tax law is about math.’” Mary Beth Beazley UNLV Law professor and former president of the Legal Writing Institute FACULTY FOCUS
Write On
RENOWNED PROFESSOR MARY BETH BEAZLEY ENHANCES REPUTATION OF SCHOOL’S STELLAR LEGAL WRITING PROGRAM BY CAMILLE CANNON In 1998, Mary Beth Beazley authored an essay titled “‘Riddikulus!’: Tenure-Track Legal-Writing Faculty and the Boggart in the Wardrobe.” Beazley, a legal writing professional with nearly 35 years of teaching experience, draws a comparison between the shape-shifting, fear-exploiting monsters of Harry Potter to the traditions and institutions “that allow legal writing to be taught but curse its teachers to a short academic life—limited by caps on contracts or thwarted by positions that allow no job security or opportunity for scholarship.” Unlike the fictional boggarts, these impositions have plagued Beazley’s entire career. Fortunately, though, they’re what led the awardwinning professor, textbook author, former chair of the American Bar Association’s Communications Skills Committee, and past president of the Legal Writing Institute to the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. It’s a perfect fit, in that Beazley has joined a law school whose legal writing program is ranked second nationally by U.S. News & World Report. “UNLV has a wonderful reputation for legal writing, and it’s an equal opportunity school,” Beazley says. Beazley recently arrived at UNLV after having previously taught legal writing at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (where she spent 29 years), University of Toledo College of Law and Vermont Law School. Early in her career, many law schools (including Vermont) required legal writing faculty to leave their positions after two years. The reason? “They thought nobody would want to do it after two years,” Beazley says. “A lot of people see the teaching of writing as the closest thing in the academy to manual labor. They think it’s not as intellectual or there’s not really scholarship to be done relevant to legal writing.” Beazley has challenged that assumption with her work, even studying and applying behavioral-science principles to legal writing and reading. (For example, how does text capitalization and structure affect how we interpret legal documents?) “One of the lines I like to use is, ‘Legal writing is not about grammar any more than tax law is about math,’” she says. Among Beazley’s scholarly contributions is a chapter on “Learning to Think Like a Wizard” in The Law and Harry Potter (she fell in love with the books in the 1990s while reading them to her two children). And, yes, that makes two of her publications inspired by the fictional wizard. Away from Hogwarts, Beazley is currently researching how our ability to retain information is affected by reading on digital platforms. She’ll continue her scholarship during the academic year as she teaches classes in legal writing and appellate advocacy at Boyd. On the personal front, Beazley—who had previously never lived west of the Mississippi River—is getting used to her new desert environs. “For the first couple days here, I was taking pictures of the mountains at every stoplight,” she says. “I’m kind of getting over that now and realizing that this is my new everyday life.” New, and finally free of boggarts. 36
UNLV Law | 2017
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