Law Links - December 2014

Lecturer Laura Reilly tries a different approach to briefs

Reilly.

Lecturer Laura Reilly

According to some legal practitioners and scholars, social media - especially Twitter - is an underutilized tool in today’s legal profession. SUNY Buffalo Law School Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research lecturer Laura Reilly, and her writing fellow Sean Balkin, have instituted a new, innovative program to address this issue – while at the same time teaching their students to be clear, concise writers.

Prior to the start of the academic year, Balkin pitched the idea of having Reilly’s 1L students use Twitter to create 140 character “tweets” for legal cases the students read during the course of the semester. The goal was twofold: first, by limiting the students to  a mere 140 characters, the students would need to express the “takeaway” of a case in a clear, concise manner; second, the students would become comfortable using social media for professional purposes. Always on the lookout for innovative ways to teach legal writing, Reilly was immediately on board.

An example of students tweeting back their responses to their assigned readings.

To condense five- to ten-page cases into 140 characters, she says that students must read the cases closely and determine the overall theme or rule the case stands for. The students then must take their analysis a step further and use “hashtags” to highlight the two or three most important words in their tweet. A “hashtag” (“#”) is used to mark tweets for searching purposes. For example, if a tweet reads “Supreme Court will rule on Defense of Marriage Act today #DOMA” any user who searched “DOMA” on Twitter would be able to find this tweet.

To date, Reilly and Balkin believe the program has been successful in reaching its goals. “The students – many of whom had not used Twitter prior to the start of the semester – have shown marked improvement in their ability to analyze and distill case law,” Reilly says.

Initially, many of the tweets included only recitations of case facts, or misstated the court’s holding. By mid-October, students were succinctly stating the primary holding and rule of a case, and many were framing cases in ways which would help solve the legal issues of a hypothetical client.

Both Reilly and Balkin credit Twitter with benefitting their students and hope the students will continue to use it to further their legal careers.