Legal research and writing projects are given out in law schools are great opportunities to go into the depth of a stream of a subject. Any law student can get to learn a great deal about the subject if he takes his legal writing seriously and works on them with integrity. It lies in the university to provide creative, unconventional and out-of-the-box legal research assignments to law students to hone their legal writing skills. In this blog, let WOLR make a suggestion or two for your law school on legal research and analysis assignments that students might find engaging.
What lacks in the legal training given by Law Schools:
What majority law schools lack nowadays is the basic and simple ability to synthesize, blend and amalgamate various topics taught in law lectures and help students connect them. The lack of an interdisciplinary approach in some law schools many times leads students to confusion and ambiguity and they lack appreciation for the legal research in the subjects they study. Students are unable to integrate and reconcile what they study with the real legal world. Therefore, most of the time, students have no clue as to what is happening around in courtrooms and they waste their time during their internship periods.
How to stimulate creativity and bring fun into law classrooms:
We are familiar with submissions of typical legal writing and analysis projects involving research and submitting a 1,000-2,000 words’ report on atopic. These types of activities don’t help students understand the subject/issue on which the project was submitted. Therefore, creativity about assignment writing is the need of the hour to be ahead of the curve and make learning fun for students.
Personally speaking, in my law school, we had the opportunity to be a part of various legal research activities/projects/assignments which made my understanding for that sub-field of law much better. For example, in our classes of Prevention of Corruption law lecture, we were given an assignment in which we had to point out of instances of ‘corruption’ from our favorite books, movies, etc. I still recollect writing an essay on the famous John Grisham bookThe Firm!
Apart from writing about it, another idea is to make law students listen to anecdotes by various lawyers and their interviews. The story of their journey, as well as lectures on various legal research and writing topics, could serve to be helpful. In a similar fashion, constant innovation in the field of legal education is necessary and WOLRcan aid in doing so. We collaborate with universities and institutions and help design customized and innovative activities to enhance legal research and writing and make learning fun!
