This paper
examines the difficulties faced by law students upon entering law school with
learning how to read and write ‘in law’ and the challenges faced by lecturers in
imparting this skill. Writing legal documents, opinion or texts requires a
particular method of analysis along with a particular and exacting style of
writing. Not only must the writing be, for the most part, unemotive and
objective, but it must also follow strict rules and use precise formats. While
teaching legal writing, the authors identified two major difficulties. First,
traditional classroom based teaching approaches are no longer feasible as they
require a significant commitment of staff time, particularly as student numbers
increase and staffing resources decrease. Second, in teaching legal writing and
research in Ireland, lecturers were until recently hampered by the
unavailability of an Irish based and Irish focused text. This paper explores
the attempt by two of the authors to deal with these challenges and the
decision to create a unified set of teaching and learning materials for legal
writing and research including a textbook How to Think, Write and Cite: Key
Skills for Irish Law Students together with an interactive website,
www.legalwriting.ie, containing self-assessment exercises linked directly to
the textbook. It is our contention that
the experience of teaching students how to write is not unique to our
discipline, and that our experiences and use of technology could usefully be
applied in other contexts.