Awards
2010-2011 Thomas F. Blackwell Memorial Award
The 2010-2011 Blackwell Award Committee invites nominations for one of the most prestigious awards in legal writing, the Thomas F. Blackwell Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Legal Writing. The winner will be announced prior to September 1, 2010, and the award will be presented at the 2011 AALS meeting in San Francisco, California. A plaque, listing the winners, is on display at Appalachian Law School.
2010 ALWD-LWI Summer Research Grants
The Association of Legal Writing Directors and Legal Writing Institute are pleased to announce the 2010 ALWD-LWI Summer Research Grants. ALWD and LWI cooperatively evaluated twenty-one impressive applications and chose to fund seven of them. LexisNexis generously agreed to donate $10,000 this year to promote two of the scholarship projects by legal writing professors, while ALWD and LWI agreed to invest an additional $25,000 to promote these projects. Each recipient will receive a $5,000 scholarship grant. The grant application process is announced around Thanksgiving, and mentors are available to work with prospective applicants over the winter break and before the February deadline. The grants and names of the chosen projects are as follows:
Lexis/Nexis
Jennifer Lear (Widener): "Plain English for Legal Writing Professors: Creating Legal Writers through Six Traits Instruction and Assessment"
Christopher R. Trudeau (Thomas M. Cooley Law School): "Plain English from A Client's Perspective: An Empirical Study of Client Preferences in Legal Writing"
LWI
Danton Berube (Detroit-Mercy): "Are 'Clickers' Just Fun or Do They Actually Work?: A Randomized Experiment Measuring the Efficacy of Student Classroom Response Devices As an Aid To Mastering the Fundamentals of Legal Research"
Amanda Smith (Widener): "Preparing for Practice from Behind the Bench"
ALWD
Michelle Falkoff (University of Iowa): "Using Fiction Writing Teaching Techniques in the Legal Writing Classroom"
Alison Donahue (Kehner) & Mary Ann Robinson (Widener): "Mission Impossible, Mission Accomplished, or Mission In Progress?: An Empirical Study of the Professionalism Movement in American Law Schools"
Jean K. Sbarge (Widener): "No Swedish Bikini Team Screensavers: Teaching Professionalism in the Legal Writing Classroom and Beyond"