The first section many attorneys read in a written court opinion contains the names of the lawyers involved in the case. Those readers might ask: Who are these lawyers? What firms are they with? Do I know them? Law students, on the other hand, often skim over the names and get straight to the outcome of the case. The Maryland Carey Law Lawyering Program teaches students to understand the people behind those names, the human story buried within each case, and helps them develop their own effective advocacy styles.
The centerpiece of the Lawyering Program is the two-semester Lawyering course sequence in which first-year students hone advocacy skills from client interviews to appellate advocacy. Together with the Morris Brown Myerowitz Moot Court Competition, the Clinical Law Program, outstanding advocacy teams, and range of experiential courses, the Lawyering Program is one of Maryland Carey Law’s cornerstones of preparing practice-ready advocates.
Court Comes to Campus
In recent years, the Lawyering Program has added three unique elements to give students a 360-degree view of what it’s like to advocate for clients.
First, the program has historically invited the Appellate Court of Maryland to spend a day each year hearing cases in the Ceremonial Moot Courtroom at Maryland Carey Law. This year, it also extended an invitation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which heard oral arguments in the building for the first time in well over a decade. Through these visits, students see not only lawyers and judges doing their jobs, but also courthouse security, courtroom formalities, and law clerks in positions the students themselves may hold before long.
“In the classroom, we prepare them for oral argument,” says Lawyering Program Director Kathryn Frey-Balter. “We do mooting. We talk about what a good oralist does ... but, watching the case live, when the judiciary comes, is an important part of that learning process. How does one‑take the understanding of a legal issue that they’ve reduced to writing and engage in extemporaneous, intelligent conversation with a panel of three judges? To observe in the courtroom is to better contextualize what we teach in the classroom.”
“What surprised me the most was how interactive the oral arguments were,” second-year student Lilly Grant recalls about the court visit her first year. “It was truly a conversation between the lawyer and the judges about the merits of the argument.” According to Grant, the court visit, along with the Lawyering Program’s oral argument requirement and watching second-year students participate in Maryland Carey Law’s legendary Myerowitz Moot Court Competition, gave her new perspectives on oral advocacy. “It was really cool to see that full-circle moment of watching these other people in awe, and then doing it myself,” she says.
Questions and Negotiations
The second recent innovation in the Lawyering Program is that the spring semester appellate argument now incorporates a pure question of law. This differentiates the Maryland Carey Law program from many other lawyering courses that focus primarily on applying established law to the facts. Frey-Balter notes that many students encounter these kinds of issues early in their careers and even during summer positions while in law school.
“Question of law problems are balanced to teach students to probe the legal controversy and to explore its gray area implications and serve as a reminder that such issues often emerge from human disputes,” she remarks.
Grant says the gravity of the question – in her class’s case, a Fourth Amendment issue about a police search – added interest to the project. “That made the arguments a lot more passionate and involved,” she says. Finally, the Lawyering Program integrates a negotiation, which builds on the theories of the case students develop during client interviews and reviews of depositions and other discovery materials. According to Frey-Balter, negotiating helps students understand that dispute resolution, rather than litigation, is often the better outcome for clients. “It’s often not a winner-take-all that’s best,” she says. “There’s an earlier off-ramp that may make more sense for your client.
The Human Side of Law
All of these elements combine to prepare students for summer positions, judicial clerkships, and practice. Grant is now a Legal Writing Fellow, assisting first-year Lawyering students on their legal writing projects. She recently competed successfully in the Myerowitz Competition, which is required for students who want to join the Moot Court Board.
The lessons Grant learned through the Lawyering Program and other advocacy activities complement her work off campus. After her first year, she clerked for Judge Terrence Zic of the Appellate Court of Maryland. She says the ability to closely analyze cases she learned in Lawyering helped her as a clerk. After graduation, she plans to be a litigator.
Frey-Balter was an assistant federal public defender before joining the Maryland Carey Law faculty full-time and still pays attention to the lawyers’ names when she reads opinions. She strives to have the Lawyering Program convey to students that those practicing attorneys listed on the judicial opinion are “mere mortals,” once law students, who, through hard work and practice, have refined the advocacy skills the program teaches.
She notes, “Year one of law school, students are inundated with one-dimensional, black and white, printed case law. ... In Lawyering, we expose students to exactly what they witnessed during the judiciary visits, which is that those otherwise antiseptic words on paper are really the rendering of human events,” adding that it is the lawyer’s awesome responsibility to usher those events through the justice system with intelligence and compassion.