The past few years I have considered ways to help students who are working on substantial academic papers. While students at our law school receive a good foundation in researching and writing memoranda and briefs, they have not received formal training in academic writing. My colleague Annalee Hickman Pierson developed a workshop with a writing professor that I have adapted and tweaked over the years. The Law Library generously provides lunch to attendees, and participation has been solid. The workshop has good content, but it also provides a springboard for me to answer students’ questions and meet with them one-on-one about their projects.

This semester, the law school started offering an optional one-credit class in academic research and writing with a writing professor. As part of the course, I taught a session on academic legal research, which was followed by a required 30-minute meeting with a librarian. I originally planned to skip the workshop this semester because I assumed the students who normally attended would be in this class instead. I changed my mind at the last minute and was surprised by workshop attendance that was as good or better than past semesters. One student in the class also attended the workshop because “it was helpful”! Click here to view my most recent slide deck for the workshop on Box.

After meeting with many students about their academic research papers, here are five ways I have discovered that academic law librarians can help:

  1. Law students really need (and want) help with their thesis. Not only is the paper format new, but many students are writing on a legal topic that is new to them. Most students are unsure about whether their topic and thesis are “good.” Some librarians may not feel comfortable giving feedback in this area. While the law professor’s feedback is the final judgment, most law librarians see a lot of faculty scholarship and can research a topic quickly enough to judge whether a student’s thesis has an appropriate scope or is sufficiently novel. I have told many students that their topics are too broad to cover adequately or too difficult to prove and need adjusting. I have also reassured students that their topics are really interesting, and they should pursue them. I always tell them to check with their professor. Often, they already have, but they still appreciate the added reassurance from a librarian.
  2. Similarly, many students appreciate help with a basic outline. Law students may have great ideas and good research, but they struggle with how to organize them into a coherent paper. Talking through a simple three- or four-part broad structure for the paper helps them get started on a more detailed outline. 
  3. Law students seldom think to use a treatise. Students understand the need to use law review and law journal articles in their research, but they almost never consider how valuable a treatise can be for an academic paper. I have found that many students have great ideas for a paper but often do not understand the underlying legal principles sufficiently. Usually, they would not know about the variety of specialized legal treatises in our collection if they did not speak to a law librarian.
  4. Law students aren’t aware of specialized encyclopedias. After taking 1L research, students are aware of state encyclopedias and general encyclopedias like American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum, but due to time constraints, specialized encyclopedias are not covered in class. Specialized encyclopedias like those from Elgar and Oxford or Max Planck are especially helpful for international law topics, and many of our students write papers for classes on international law.
  5. Law students don’t need to know everything about their topic to start writing. I struggle with this myself: I think I need to know EVERYTHING before I can type a single word, only to discover while writing that I wasted time researching something irrelevant and overlooked something important. Because students are on a tight schedule, I encourage them to get to the outlining or drafting stage as quickly as possible, then let the structure of the paper dictate their research. 

I would love to hear what other law librarians have found helpful for law students, so please drop a comment or send an email if you have a tip to share!