Dr Paul Burgess is a Lecturer at the Monash University Faculty of Law. He teaches in Public Law as well as several subjects related to Artificial Intelligence. He has also taught Public Law, Constitutional Theory, Human Rights, and Jurisprudence at University College London – where he was shortlisted for the UCL Provost Education Award 2020. Paul is passionate about providing law students with essay writing and argumentative skills – something that he sees as lacking in almost all law school curricula. At both UCL and Monash he has developed resources to enhance student outcomes through skills-based seminars and workshops. In doing this, he spends most of his time distilling questions, answers, cases, and journal articles into easy to follow and logical if/then arguments – which he sees as the core of both a good essay and a good argument.
Legal Essay Writing Workshops: A Worthy Addition to Skills-Based Learning at Law Schools?
Abstract:
Legal essay writing is a skill that must be mastered to succeed in a law degree. Students often struggle with this skill. And legal educators frequently bemoan students’ lack of ability to write legal essays. Yet, despite these problems, many law schools do not provide formal instruction on how to write legal essays – even though students are often provided with formal instruction on legal research and other skills. For those that wish to institute training on legal essay writing, there is little formal evidence of the potential student improvement that may result and there is little indication on the relative time that must be spent to achieve any improvement. This may be one potential reason why more law schools do not provide such instruction. In order to address these issues, we provided a large cohort of undergraduate law students in two first-year law units with the option of attending workshops that provided formal instruction on legal essay writing. To assess student improvement, the students’ essay writing performance in these two units was then compared with their essay writing performance in a unit conducted prior to the essay writing workshops. The results of the assessment, and feedback provided by students, illustrate both the potential improvement that can be gained from such a programme as well as the relative time/effort that is necessary to achieve those gains.