LAWS4483 · Law

Advanced Legal Writing: Appellate Litigation

Boston College Law School

This course will provide an overview of the basics of appellate procedure and introduce participants to the nuances of appellate writing offering students the opportunity to hone their writing skills in the process.Over the course of the semester, students will research and author their own appellate brief on a fixed record presenting a discrete legal topic. Throughout the drafting process, we will walk through the constituent parts of a brief and describe best practices. Beyond the drafting specifics, the course will introduce students tobig-picture issues in appellate writing. We will cover the substantive(how the standard of review influences the entire brief) to the stylistic(typography and the great font debates) and everything in between (how to structure and style argument headers to create an effective table of contents).We will review standout examples of legal writing, dissecting good briefs to examine what makes them work so well. We will also review ineffective briefs to illustrate potential pitfalls. Finally, we will discuss common issues encountered in appellate writing everything from recurring grammatical issues to effectively managing jargon and defined terms. This course is an ideal fit for students interested in judicial clerkships,appellate practice, or further developing their research and writingskills. Ideally, by the course's end, students will have a firm grasp ofthe fundamentals of appellate writing and a polished writing sample on a sophisticated legal topic.