Instructor: Professor Paula Kaldis
Email: pota@mslaw.edu
Phone: 978.681.0800. ext 117
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Each professor is responsible for classes of 12 students and they meet twice a week. This class emphasizes one-on-one teaching and learning.
For example, there is hands-on training in finding the law to evaluate and address their clients’ situations. There will also be more hands-on library time. There will be ten graded in-class writings, related to the memoranda and briefs the students are working on, with quick and effective feedback.
Students will assume an advocate’s role, and, as junior attorneys in a law firm, will draft a legal memorandum to a trial court and, later in the semester, an appellate brief. The students will be placed on opposite sides of the case for the trial court memo, and then switch places when they are assigned the appellate brief, so that they will have had the opportunity to represent both sides.
The papers will be graded and reviewed individually with the students by the professors, who act as the senior attorneys in the law office. Students rewrite, edit, do further research and then resubmit to the “senior attorney,” before the document is submitted to the court. In addition to teaching persuasive writing, this course will reinforce the substantive law that will be tested on the bar examination.
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