Discovery Winter 2024 % Volume 10, No. 1
the newsletter from washington and lee university school of law
THE W&L LAW CLASSROOM TODAY:
Connections Still Make the Difference
C
old calls. Open memos. Office hour debates. Seminar papers. That first client phone call. These are just a few of the milestones on the student journey from law student to lawyer-to-be. And while the faces in the classroom have changed over the years, the student experience at W&L Law today would seem very familiar even to those who graduated decades ago. Of course, the curriculum is not frozen in time. W&L has increased experimental education requirements through additional clinics, externships and practice-based capstone classes
know as practicums. The law school also revamped the legal writing curriculum, hiring full-time legal writing instructors to teach the 1L small sections. At the same time, today’s 1L Torts students are still greeted by a flourish of judicial robes as Professor Brian Murchison enters the classroom for the first time, and later in the semester, they huddle around him in the hallway outside his office for exam review. It is this connection between faculty and students inside and outside the classroom that sets the W&L Law experience apart.
The Class: Legal Writing The Professor: Catlin Meade The Student: Spencer Thomas ’25L Meade: I think the most challenging thing for students is that this is not really a class about writing. Although we do discuss grammar, how to structure a legal analysis, and writing style strategies, the class is really about how to properly engage in legal analysis and how to communicate that analysis to a variety of audiences. It’s often through the work they do in Legal Writing that they realize that practicing law often means working in the gray areas on novel or complicated issues. As a result, the first writing assignment is usually a challenge because it is so unlike the papers and exams they wrote for their undergraduate degree. In college, papers and exams generally summarize research or class topics. However, in law school, the students are asked — usually for the first time — to make an important decision by extrapolating from the results of similar, but not the same, facts. Summarizing the law isn’t enough. Thomas: Legal writing does not come naturally to me (or, I don’t think, most people) in the way that expository writing does. When I first started law school, this was a frustrating reality to accept. But the fact of the matter is that being good at anything as complex and nuanced as the law requires a lot of hard work, plain and simple. I was the closest I had ever been to having a real-life panic attack the morning a draft of our open memo was due during the 1L fall semester. (I was an officer in the Army before law school — it was not that I do not cope well with stress generally.) Working at 5:30 the morning the draft was due was the first time in law school I felt tears welling up in my face. Later that morning I went to Professor Meade to profess my incompetence and apologize for submitting horribly incomplete work. She was kind, encouraging, and she reassured me that I was a competent student who was simply learning a challenging new skill. I kept at it. Like everything else, it got better with time and effort. My final draft was, I think, at least competent. It was undoubtedly leaps and bounds ahead of what I had originally turned in. Meade: I mostly interact with my current students during office hours. In addition to working through whatever class-related questions they have, I try to get to know them better as individuals. I believe that the more I know who a student is outside of law school, the better I can teach them. I like to share my experiences with my students as well, as continued on page 2
Top: Professor Catlin Meade catches up with her former legal writing student Spencer Thomas ’25L, now a staff writer on Law Review. Above: 1L students gather outside the faculty offices to review their open memos with their legal writing instructor.