July 15, 2024

Legal writing faculty win awards for contributions to the field

Two esteemed faculty members of the top-ranked legal writing program at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University have been recognized for their work on a national scale. 

Professor Sue McMahon’s article was selected as the Legal Writing Institute’s Phelps Award winner for Excellence in Scholarship in Legal Communication for her article “What We Teach When We Teach Legal Analysis,” published in Minnesota Law Review. 

The Phelps Award honors and draws attention to outstanding pieces of scholarship specific to the legal writing discipline that are published in the calendar year. The award is meant to set aspirational standards for others writing in the field. ASU Law Professor Sue Chesler, also on the legal writing team, won the award in 2020. ASU Law’s legal writing program is ranked No. 5 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. 

“It's a true honor,” said McMahon. “My motivation for writing the article was that we could do a better job of teaching legal analysis. To have my peers in the legal writing community –the best group of teachers I know – recognize that work and embrace it – well, I'm just over the moon about it.”

In her article, McMahon argues that legal analysis taught in law schools often tells students that the law is fair and just, and tends to leave out the injustices that can be baked into it. She writes that students should also be taught to create change by using legal reasoning. 

“I ended my article with an argument that we should teach more creative thinking, helping students learn how to create new rules, not just apply established ones,” she said. “My next piece will dive into that idea a bit – what would teaching creative analysis look like? I hope to give law professors a toolkit to bring these ideas into their classrooms.”

Professor Mary Bowman was also honored by the LWI as a recipient of the Courage Award, along with Bob Brain, clinical professor of law at Loyola Law School. The award honors a LWI member “who has demonstrated courage by doing, despite fear, something that most people would not do.” 

Bowman and Brain have been leading the effort to persuade the American Bar Association to eliminate Standard 405(d) and revise Standard 405(c), which allows universities to treat legal writing professors differently than other law professors in terms of job titles and security. The ABA proposal to make these changes received widespread public support, and the ABA is refining its drafting of the standards language. LWI has said this would be "the greatest change in the legal writing field in 25 years." 

“I’m so grateful for this recognition of my work fighting for improved status for legal writing faculty,” said Bowman. “That’s an issue that I have been passionate about for my whole career, and I have been in various leadership positions working on that issue since the Legal Writing Institute began focusing on these issues in 2014. I’ve been grateful over the last decade to help faculty at individual schools improve their job security, workload and faculty governance rights. But my work on lobbying the ABA to amend the law school accreditation standards has the potential to have a wider and more systematic impact.” 

Always looking to better the law school experience for her students, Bowman is currently working on a journal article about overcoming negative emotions that pose barriers to student learning. She said that work, and her work changing ABA standards, would not be possible without her fellow legal writing professors. 

“ASU Law supports legal writing faculty pursuing a variety of professional projects that interest us, including but not limited to scholarly production,” she said. “We have a great team doing such a wide variety of impactful work beyond our critical work with our students, and I so appreciate being part of such a fantastic team.”

Written by Lindsay Walker