ALWD Association of Legal Writing Directors

The Association of Legal Writing Directors and the Legal Writing Institute are pleased to announce the 2011 LWI-ALWD Summer Research Grants. LWI and ALWD cooperatively evaluated many impressive applications and chose to fund five of them. LexisNexis generously agreed to donate $10,000 this year to promote two of the scholarship projects by legal writing professors, while LWI and ALWD agreed to invest an additional $15,000 to promote these projects. Each recipient will receive a $5,000 scholarship grant.

The grants and names of the proposed projects are as follows:

ALWD: $5,000 each

Pam Jenoff, Novel Ideas: Importing Fiction Writing Process and Techniques to Enhance Legal Writing

Christine Cerniglia, The Legal Estuary: A study of the state trial law clerk.

Lexis: $5,000 each

Jacob Carpenter, Unique Problems and Creative Solutions to Assessing Learning Outcomes in Transactional Drafting Courses: Overcoming the "Form Book Problem"

Heidi Brown, Increasing Our Emotional Intelligence In the Legal Writing Classroom to Engage, Motivate, and Coach the Facebook Generation of Law Students.

LWI: $5,000

Sarah Morath & Ann Schiavone, You Write Like a Girl: Do Gender Differences Exist in Persuasive Legal Writing?

The Association of Legal Writing Directors and Legal Writing Institute are pleased to announce the 2010 ALWD-LWI Summer Research Grants. ALWD and LWI cooperatively evaluated twenty-one impressive applications and chose to fund seven of them. LexisNexis generously agreed to donate $10,000 this year to promote two of the scholarship projects by legal writing professors, while ALWD and LWI agreed to invest an additional $25,000 to promote these projects. Each recipient will receive a $5,000 scholarship grant. The grant application process is announced around Thanksgiving, and mentors are available to work with prospective applicants over the winter break and before the February deadline. The grants and names of the chosen projects are as follows:

Lexis/Nexis

Jennifer Lear (Widener): "Plain English for Legal Writing Professors: Creating Legal Writers through Six Traits Instruction and Assessment"

Christopher R. Trudeau (Thomas M. Cooley Law School): "Plain English from A Client's Perspective: An Empirical Study of Client Preferences in Legal Writing"

LWI

Danton Berube (Detroit-Mercy): "Are 'Clickers' Just Fun or Do They Actually Work?: A Randomized Experiment Measuring the Efficacy of Student Classroom Response Devices As an Aid To Mastering the Fundamentals of Legal Research"

Amanda Smith (Widener): "Preparing for Practice from Behind the Bench"

ALWD

Michelle Falkoff (University of Iowa): "Using Fiction Writing Teaching Techniques in the Legal Writing Classroom"

Alison Donahue (Kehner) & Mary Ann Robinson (Widener): "Mission Impossible, Mission Accomplished, or Mission In Progress?: An Empirical Study of the Professionalism Movement in American Law Schools"

Jean K. Sbarge (Widener): "No Swedish Bikini Team Screensavers: Teaching Professionalism in the Legal Writing Classroom and Beyond"