The organic development of a legal writing and tutoring programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Law: Reflections on a sustainable, structured approach to teaching and tutoring legal writing in South African law schools.
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Date
2022
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Abstract
Although much advocacy work takes place in courts, a considerable amount of the background work and day-to-day tasks of lawyers is writing and clearly articulating various legal positions. Thus, the ability to write like a lawyer is very important. However, legal academics as well as the law profession have consistently made the point that there is a real issue with the quality of legal writing of law students. This is a problem that many South African Universities are grappling with, and which must be addressed urgently.
An examination of the literature, through the lens of four iterations of legal writing programmes implemented at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Law, Howard College, shows that the key drivers of good legal writing are critical thinking and student motivation. If these principles are incorporated into the structure of the programme, it will help students to be motivated to think critically, which will enable them to engage on a sufficiently deep level with the material being studied. This in turn should help to produce written work that is persuasive. Thus, it is submitted that the design of a legal writing programme should include four teaching principles: the constructive alignment of the programme; a commitment to learner participation; the implementation of conversations in feedback; and the transformative contextualisation of programme materials.
However, the real question is how can a sustainable, structured approach to teaching and tutoring legal writing in South African law schools be achieved with large classes of novice legal writers and legal lecturers sometimes having overwhelming teaching loads and competing academic commitments? It may seem like an impossible task, but it is not if the legal writing programme is pedagogically well-designed and administratively well-structured. This thesis submits that the answer lies in training senior law student peer tutors to assist in a legal writing programme.
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Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.