LEAF: Legal English and Foundations
LEAF: Legal English and Foundations
Date: Monday, July 21 - Friday, August 15, 2008
Cost: $3,500
Registration: Register securely online
For more information contact: Adi Altshuler, a-altshuler@law.northwestern.edu
LEAF: Legal English and Foundations is a four-week intensive legal English program that improves international legal professionals’ legal communication and academic skills, with an emphasis on the ability to understand and engage in classroom discussion of legal issues.
Developed by the School of Law, the Legal English and Foundations curriculum is distinctive for its "reading and discussion" courses. These survey five first-year and two second-year law school courses that are considered most useful for international students about to begin an LL.M. or J.D. program. Specifically, surveys of Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Torts, Contracts, Legal Ethics, and Corporations Law follow an introductory overview of the U.S. Legal System. Reading and discussion course methodology centers on guided small group discussion, with students often empowered to lead and provoke small-scale and classroom-wide legal debates.
At the conclusion of each reading and discussion course is a brief but challenging substantive exam, after which a distinguished practitioner or Northwestern University professor of law provides the class a highly participatory ‘capstone lecture.’ These offer a direct view into U.S. legal practice or advanced legal studies, and an opportunity to interact on an intimate scale with some of the Chicago legal community’s excellent minds.
The other major component of the curriculum is legal writing instruction. Featuring daily writing work and a great deal of written feedback, the course enables students to write about legal issues more accurately, concisely, grammatically, and persuasively, and in the rhetorical modes appropriate to legal practice.
A required emphasis on vocabulary overlays both the writing and reading and discussion courses. Students will be challenged to master, and will be tested on, essential legal terminology and a Law School Word List (the 475 advanced English words especially common in first-year legal academic reading materials) developed by one of the Legal English and Foundations professors.
Every Legal English and Foundations course will be taught by Northwestern University School of Law professors, who will be experienced teachers of both legal substance and of learners for whom English is a second language. Classes will be held at the School of Law's Chicago campus from 9:05 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday, with a fifty-five minute break for lunch. Classes will meet from 9:05 AM to 12:05 on Fridays, after which students attend legal and cultural field trips and events.
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