Legal Practice Skills Senior Lecturer






Location: Philadelphia

Open Date: Dec 08, 2023

Deadline:



The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School is one of the nation's oldest and most distinguished law schools. The School offers a unique approach, incorporating cross-disciplinary legal education, a distinctly collaborative environment, and an innovative curriculum to enrich student learning. The small and highly interdisciplinary faculty achieves scholarly excellence while emphasizing a shared effort to advance understanding of the law. The result is an intellectual community that bridges traditional boundaries and disciplines within a renowned internal culture of collegiality, making the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School an extraordinarily supportive academic community for all its members.


Penn Carey Law is seeking a faculty member to serve as a Senior Lecturer in the Legal Practice Skills Program. Penn Carey Law's innovative Legal Practice Skills Program offers practical training in the writing and communication skills today's lawyers need. The centerpiece of the program is a mandatory first-year course, which spans two semesters and carries six credits (four in the fall; two in the spring). While providing students with a solid foundation in legal research, analysis, and writing, Legal Practice Skills also introduces students to a range of other essential practice skills, including fact development, interviewing, negotiation, basic contract drafting, and informal oral and written communication. The course presents assignments as simulations to help students understand the context in which these skills are deployed in practice.


More broadly, the Legal Practice Skills program seeks to encourage our students to recognize practice readiness and skill development as central to their Penn Carey Law experience and offer opportunities for them to build those skills over the course of their three years here. To that end, the Legal Practice Skills program also functions as an umbrella organization for a range of other Law School activities and services, including upper-level course development, the Academic Support program, the summer legal writing course for LLM students, additional writing assistance and writing sample support, co-curricular skills development programming, and the intramural moot court competition. The person hired for this position may also be called upon to assist with one or more of these related programs.


Senior Lecturers teach Legal Practice Skills to one section of approximately forty first-year students, assume substantial responsibility for one of the other Legal Practice Skills activities and services, and have the option of teaching an upper-level experiential writing or practical-skills course. Senior Lecturers are encouraged to engage in the larger Penn Carey Law community as well as the national legal practice and writing communities, including by attending conferences, presentations, and symposia.


In their role as teachers of the Legal Practice Skills course, Senior Lecturers are expected to: