Lawyers | Poets | PoetryProfessor James R. Elkins
College of Law :: West Virginia University Fall, 2006
Locate one of your law school legal writings, preferably a legal brief, and see if you can determine, by way of your reading of poetry, how the language in the brief falters.
Compare with law: civil and criminal procedure (we teach criminal law before we teach criminal procedure; until recent years, we did not teach civil procedure in the first semester of the lst year and some of us continue to hold to the antiquated notion that it is a mistake to teach the course in the 1st semester today). We teach law without teaching the rules of statutory construction, or the rules we associate with starae decisis. We teach corporations and securities law without sending you first to get an MBA; we teach law and psychiatry and students in that course may never have had a psychology course. We teach tax law and do not require you to have had an accounting course. As background reading for this question, you might begin by perusing the following guides to poetry:  Poetry and Why We Don't Read It, Don't Know Anything About It, and Assume We Can Live Perfectly Well Without It
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