United States Legal Language and Culture

Teresa Kissane Brostoff is Professor and Director of Legal Writing at University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She researches, writes, and lectures on legal writing methodology and pedagogy, including methods of teaching international students. Professor Brostoff has taught English for Lawyers in many countries, including Serbia, Ukraine, Kosovo under State Department auspices, Iceland as a distinguished Fulbright Scholar, Japan, Poland, Ethiopia as an invited lecturer, Belgium as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and member of the EU LLM. faculty, and Bahrain under Department of Commerce sponsorship. Prior to joining the Pittsburgh Law faculty, Professor Brostoff clerked for the Honorable Justin M. Johnson on the Pennsylvania Superior Court. She also has recently been appointed to the Fulbright Peer Review Selection Committee in Law.Ann Sinsheimer is Professor of Legal Writing at University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She has extensive experience as a teacher and consultant of legal and technical writing, and of English as a Second Language. She co-teaches a summer intensive program for international lawyers, and has had the opportunity to teach this course overseas in Ethiopia, Serbia, Belgium, Iceland, and other countries. She served as a lecturer and consultant at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan's English Language Institute. Before joining the faculty at Pittsburgh, Professor Sinsheimer worked at the University of Oxford's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics.

• SECTION I. THE LAW SCHOOL CLASSROOM ; Chapter 1 - Skills ; Chapter 2 - The Legal System ; Chapter 3 - Reading and Briefing Cases ; SECTION II. USING THE LAW TO PREDICT AND PERSUADE ; Chapter 4 - Using Cases ; Chapter 5 - Using Statutes ; Chapter 6 - Synthesizing Cases ; Chapter 7 - Appellate Advocacy ; Chapter 8 - Client Interviews and Negotiation ; SECTION III. INDEPENDENT WRITING AND RESEARCH ; Chapter 9 - Working Independently ; APPENDICES ; Appendix A: Glossary ; Appendix B: Pennsylvania and U.S. Constitutions ; Appendix C: Sample Brief and Memorandum ; Appendix D: Sample Appellate Briefs ; Appendix E: Neff v. Lasso, 555 A.2d 1304 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1989) ; Appendix F: Sample Student Memo on International Arbitration Exercise ; Appendix G: Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999) ; Appendix H: Answer Key