When Worlds Collide: Exploring Intersections Between Legal Writing and Clinical Pedagogy, Scholarship, and Practice
Philip N. Meyer*
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The Theme
The essays presented in this issue of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (J. ALWD) began as presentations delivered on the panel of the Legal Writing Section Program at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in Washington, D.C., in January 2007. The theme of the Section Program, When Worlds Collide, focused on relationships between legal writing teachers and clinicians in teaching and scholarship. Specifically, these essays explore existing intersections between legal writing and clinical pedagogy, scholarship, and practice as well as the spaces where there is an undeveloped potential for forging and developing professional relationships between writing and clinical teachers. Thus, this symposium is about where legal writing and clinical teachers meet as colleagues and as collaborators. But it is equally about where we collide and where we miss each other.
Over twenty years ago in the Journal of Legal Education, Prof. Anthony G. Amsterdam, a visionary clinician and a father figure of American clinical legal education, anticipated that by the 21st Century, education in clinical and legal writing and research would intersect and merge.1 He was, simply put, wrong. It never happened. It could have happened, but it didn't. Instead, clinical and legal writing practice and pedagogy have remained largely independent and autonomous disciplines within legal education. Clinical and legal writing programs have discrete courses and curricula, publish independent professional journals, and host different conferences. Indeed, at many schools, including my current school and the three other schools where I have taught, legal writing teachers and clinicians inhabit separate buildings that are physically (as well as metaphorically) disconnected from one another. We meet occasionally in our busy schedules, perhaps in a commissary for lunch, or at a faculty meeting, or when engaged in committee work or institutional activities. We are often complementary forces within the institution, taking similar and supportive positions politically and pedagogically. Nevertheless, we often seem to inhabit separate institutional worlds; hence the title of this program, When Worlds Collide.
Although legal writing education and clinical education have remained discrete, our pedagogy, practices, and scholarship overlap. The MacCrate Report emphasizes that legal writing, analysis, and research are core professional and clinical skills.2 Clinical teachers teach legal writing, reasoning, and research extensively in clinical courses and in clinical settings. Likewise, legal writing teachers often systematically teach other clinical and lawyering skills. Of course, there are differences between our respective pedagogies as well; for example, clinical education takes place in the context of "live" client cases seldom employed in traditional legal writing courses. Yet, the pedagogical goals of legal writing teachers and clinicians inevitably overlap a great deal. Our common focus is to educate students for competent, ethical, and meaningful practice; we both teach the professional skills crucial for professional life.
Similarly, legal writing teachers and clinicians typically have common scholarly concerns and methodologies; clinicians and legal writing teachers reflect upon pedagogy and practices and build theory from close observation of particular cases and the systematic analysis of legal practices. Thus, our scholarly topics reflect and embody our respective pedagogies and practices. There have been recent efforts at collaboration in teaching and scholarship; nevertheless, the readership of legal writing journals and clinical journals remains discrete, and collaboration between legal writing teachers and clinicians is the exception rather than the rule.
"Negative capability" is a phrase I borrow from poetry and twist to suit my purposes in this introduction. It provides a useful conceptual tool for beginning to explore the complex and curiously ambivalent professional relationships between clinicians and legal writing teachers. This phrase suggests that it is the spaces and gaps, the indeterminacies and absences in a poem (sometimes even existing in opposition or counterpoint to the words) that often provide as much of the contextual meaning and structure for a poem as the words of the poem itself. That is, what is immanent is just as important and as structurally relevant as what is expressly articulated. The absences shape meaning. Curiously, this concept is equally relevant to understanding the complexity of professional relationships between clinicians and legal writing teachers. Perhaps this complexity and ambivalence is best suggested by telling the "back story" of this program: how the idea for the theme of this program developed initially and later evolved. I hope that this personal story sets the stage for the essays in this symposium, since various presenters are characters in this story.
∗ © Philip N. Meyer 2007. Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing, Vermont Law School. The text of this essay is an edited version of the introduction presented during the Legal Writing, Reasoning and Research Section Program at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Assocation of American Law Schools (AALS). I am grateful to my excellent research assistant, Johanna Evans.
1 Anthony G. Amsterdam, Clinical Legal Education—A 21st Century Perspective, 34 J. Leg. Educ. 612 (1984).
2 ABA Sec. Leg. Educ. & Admis. to the B., Legal Education and Professional Development— An Educational Continuum, Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap (ABA 1992) (the chair of the task force was Robert MacCrate).