This page looks plain and unstyled because you're using a non-standard compliant browser. To see it in its best form, please upgrade to a browser that supports web standards. It's free and painless.

CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

And the Oscar Goes to....What Movies Can Teach Us About Legal Writing

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | October 19, 2007 - 13:54

There’s nothing like a good movie: film makes mere words tangible, so that the viewer truly experiences the story and arrives at a level of understanding touching all the senses. Do we ever say that about a brief or legal memorandum? One legal writing professor thinks we ought to strive for such impact: Elyse Pepper, in “The Case for 'Thinking Like a Filmmaker': Using Lars Von Trier's Dogville as a Model for Writing a Statement of Facts" (St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07-0083 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1019524 October 2007, Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, forthcoming) posits that adopting film story telling techniques may help legal writers learn to construct powerful and persuasive fact statements.

Pepper’s students viewed and analyzed the film Dogville for the exercise in learning to tell the facts compellingly and from different points of view. If, upon reading the article, you would like to try her method with another film, you’ll likely find a suitable candidate in the Law Library’s Audio-Visual Collection Catalog.


Legal Research & Writing, Library Resources and Databases:: Comment (0) :: Permalink :: Trackbacks (0) AddThis Social Bookmark Button

 
Accessible and Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS
Powered by pLog - Design by BalearWeb