Lawyering Skills in the Doctrinal Classroom: Using Legal Writing Pedagogy to Enhance Teaching Across the Law School Curriculum

After decades of taking a back seat to doctrine, lawyering skills have lately become the star of the legal education reform movement. Few law schools continue to question whether essential lawyering skills such as legal writing, research, and advocacy deserve a prominent place in the curriculum. Yet law schools continue to struggle with an artificial split between “doctrinal” courses and “skills” courses—a split that ignores best practices and undermines student learning. In this book, which includes an introduction by Sophie Sparrow, more than twenty law professors who have figured out how to bridge the gap show why integrating skills into traditional doctrinal courses is crucial to student learning and offer proven strategies for how to do it.