Source: https://www.law.umaryland.edu/Faculty-and-Staff/Employee-Handbooks-and-Policies/Faculty-Supervision-of-Student-Seminar-Papers/
Timestamp: 2019-10-14 04:22:22
Document Index: 10867797

Matched Legal Cases: ['art 1', 'art 2', 'art 3', 'art 4', 'art 5', 'art 4']

Faculty Supervision of Student Seminar Papers | Maryland Carey Law
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Faculty members are often in the position of supervising student writing. In a seminar, the written paper is the heart of the student and faculty’s work together. It is an opportunity to convey to the student an understanding of the faculty member’s role as legal scholar. The students are in effect asked to create a small piece of legal scholarship and the faculty member can help them achieve the scholarly goal of pushing beyond the merely descriptive to the analytical work that we want them to produce.
An additional resource that can help students write better seminar papers is the law school’s Writing Center. Through both group workshops and one-on-one meetings, the Writing Center can help students better to understand both the scholarly writing process and its resulting product. The writing fellows can offer ideas and techniques to assist student at any stage of the scholarly writing process: topic selection, deciding on research strategies, organizing notes, outlining, getting started on the first draft, rewriting and revising. The Writing Center also has a bank of sample student scholarly papers.
It may be helpful to give the student a structure for a traditional law review article/note/comment. For example, the professor might require that any first draft contain something in each of the following parts of the paper so that feedback is useful. The student might be instructed to organize the paper into five parts with a draft of each due at the time the first draft is due. The faculty member might remind the student that the first goal of legal scholarship is to instruct the reader who is often not familiar with the area generally. So a typical structure might include: Part 1. Introduction: Why the topic is an important problem or issue in the law; Part 2. The legislative or judicial history leading up to the current status quo; Part 3. The positions taken by other scholars in the area; Part 4. The student’s original contribution which may be a proposal for a new legislative or judicial test or an exception to a rule or for example, the addition of one prong of a three- part test, or a critique of the other scholars positions, e.g."Professor X says A and Professor Y says B – both are correct as far as they go, but they should also consider C." and; Part 5. Conclusion.
Students should be encouraged to submit a draft that contains all five parts since feedback on the merely descriptive parts does not give the faculty member the chance to make sure the student is working on an original idea (Part 4) or to give feedback. Most students can write the descriptive part of the paper quite well – it is usually the original idea that needs work and that should be included in the first draft.
Oral presentations on the research papers are scheduled for the final four weeks of the semester. You should expect your presentation to be about 15 - 20 minutes long, followed by approximately 20 minutes of questions and discussion. In order to assist your classmates in preparing for your presentation, you must supply the class with reading material at least one full week before you are scheduled to speak. The materials should include an excerpt of your paper and other related readings. You should also consider posting discussion questions to the listserv prior to your presentation.
As you plan the structure of your presentation, consider ways of making the best use of your time. The goal of the presentation is to teach your colleagues the important, primary issues that have grown out of your research for the paper, and how you think these issues should be resolved (in effect, your thesis). In furtherance of this goal, think about the best way to present your points:
Keep your presentation concise and focused. Start by introducing your topic, explaining why it is important, summarizing any needed background information, and setting forth your thesis. In many ways, the form of the presentation’s introduction follows the form of the paper’s introduction. Follow your introduction by setting out the main issues you addressed, what methods you used to resolve them, and what conclusions you therefore reached.
Use a hypothetical, case study, or narrative to illustrate your problem in a more concrete fashion. After giving an overview of the topic and indicating where the issues you are addressing fit in, it often helps to use one of these techniques to present the problem more concretely. Alternatively, you might want to start your presentation with the hypothetical, case study, or narrative to draw in the class’s interest and highlight the importance of the problem.
1 From Susan Hankin’s Public Health and the Law Seminar, as adapted from Oral Presentation Guidelines prepared by Paula Monopoli.