Admissions

Legal Analysis & Writing Preview Course

Faculty

Professor Norton has taught legal rhetoric and writing courses full time since 1998. She is a nationally-recognized expert in law teaching and legal writing, and long-time member of the Legal Writing Institute and Association of Legal Writing Directors. Professor Norton pioneered the field of intergenerational competence in legal education, focusing her scholarship on helping legal educators leverage the positive characteristics of Xers and Millennials to improve law teaching.
 
Professor Zakarin has been teaching Legal Process, the first year legal research and writing course, for eleven years at Touro Law School and remains committed to helping her students become better, stronger writers. She also proposed and developed a new course Cybercrime, which she has been teaching consecutively since 2010. With an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Professor Zakarin brings her combined interest in technology and law to her popular elective course in Cybercrime, as well as this new Portal to Law School program in Legal Analysis and Writing.
 
Course Description
This course will take students through the basic process of legal analysis. This process of legal analysis is the key to learning the law in all law school courses. It is also the building block for every evaluative and persuasive document that lawyers write. Students will produce a short writing sample that demonstrates their newly-acquired legal analysis and writing skills.
 
Course Objectives
  • To give you an introduction to the study of legal analysis and writing that you will experience in your first year of law school
  • To give you an edge as you start law school in working with rules of law and applying them to client facts
  • To give you the opportunity to produce a short analytical writing sample demonstrating your legal analysis and writing skills
  • To give you additional practice in exercising your analytical “muscles” as you prepare for the LSAT
 

Week

Topics

Class Preparation

Week 1

Introduction to U.S. Legal System Relationship Between Cases & Statutes

Reading & Briefing Cases

Readings, videos, and basic exercises to be distributed at the beginning of the week and completed in advance of the online course meeting for that week

Week 2

Legal Rules in Cases & Statutes

Rule Synthesis

Week 3

Applying a Synthesized Rule to Facts

Communicating Your Analysis (IRAC)

Drafting a Legal Argument

Week 4

Drafting a Legal Argument (continued)

 
 

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