Ralph Brill

Ralph L. Brill (born December 19, 1935) is Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. He is regarded by many as the father of Legal Writing based on his duration in the field along with his efforts at advancing the interests of the profession nationally.Fact|date=May 2008

Early life

Brill was born in Chicago, the son of Romanian immigrants. He attended the University of Illinois, where he received both his undergraduate degree and his Juris Doctor. While in law school, Brill served as associate editor of the University of Illinois Law Forum. He was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1960.

Establishing a legal writing course

Brill began teaching law school in the fall of 1960 (while Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He began to teach a subject outside the customary law school discipline — Legal Writing — as part of a class entitled "Problems and Research". At this time Brill fell in love with teaching and began to recognize the importance of including skills courses in the law school curriculum. Brill also became aware early on that "skills" teachers, such as those who taught legal writing, were treated differently from "substantive" (non-skills) teachers who were considered part of the regular faculty. According to institutional protocol, non-skills, or "theoretical", professors were compensated at a higher rate and given more political power than were their peers teaching nontheoretical and pragmatically oriented courses.

Following his year in Ann Arbor, in 1961, Brill returned to his hometown when he was offered a position at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Brill taught torts and several sections of legal writing.

Legal writing program at Chicago-Kent

In 1977, Brill was asked by administrators at Chicago-Kent to set up a larger scale legal writing program. At that time, legal writing was still not considered an important discipline in legal study, and those law schools offering legal writing courses did so sporadically, often with part-time instructors, and, in many instances, staffed with individuals who were not legal professionals. Many legal educational institutions at the time maintained that skills teaching was the province of law firms, and that the discipline of legal writing was little more than a remedial grammar course not appropriate, even if necessary, in a graduate school setting.

Recognizing that skills instruction went far beyond a course in remedial grammar, Brill proposed a three-year legal writing program which would be taught by legal professionals, and would be of a uniform quality for all students. Brill further proposed that class sizes be reduced so that students would receive more individualized instruction. The Chicago-Kent faculty adopted Brill’s proposal and the legal writing program at Kent not only became the benchmark for all law school legal writing programs, but Chicago-Kent became known for the high level of legal training that its students received.

Brill remained director of Chicago-Kent’s legal writing program for fourteen years, and worked tirelessly to improve the status of the legal writing professional. Aside from Chicago-Kent and a few other pioneer law schools, most legal writing departments consisted of one director and a staff of part-time instructors whose contractual time at a particular school was limited, and who were not considered true law school professors.

In 1985, Brill became one of the original Board members of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), an association of legal writing professionals who, until the establishment of the LWI, had no opportunity to exchange ideas or to compare experiences as to status at their schools. The LWI enabled them to band together in an attempt to enhance programs and status at their own schools.

While working toward national goals related to the profession of the legal writing instructor, Brill continued to enhance the quality of his own program at Chicago-Kent. He helped to ensure that instructors in his own department, although not having the status of tenured faculty, were able to work without capped contracts. Moreover, Brill, who was always an innovator as a teacher, began, at the earliest stages of national computer use, to incorporate technology into his teaching by way of the use of listservs and visual presentations in class. In the early 1990’s, Chicago-Kent became known for its use of technology in law school, and Brill was instrumental in establishing American Bar Association accreditation standards related to distance learning in law schools.

Brill stepped down as director of Chicago-Kent’s legal writing program in 1992, but remained on the faculty of Chicago-Kent teaching Torts and Tort-related subjects.

Other achievements

Although Brill is primarily associated with legal writing, his work has enhanced legal education in numerous ways. Brill served as interim dean at Chicago-Kent on two separate occasions in the early 1970s, and taught Torts throughout his entire tenure as director of Chicago-Kent’s legal writing program. He continues to work with the school’s moot court team and sponsors the Brief award for the Chicago-Kent’s intraschool moot court competition. He has been chair of the American Association of Law Schools' (AALS) Section on Legal Writing, Research and Reasoning and of the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Committee. Brill has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate computers into the law school classroom, and has spoken on issues related to replacing the traditional law school handwritten exam with an exam typed on a laptop.

In addition to his work in legal education, Brill has been active in the Chicago Bar Association and was part of a committee drafting rules related to continuing legal education in the state of Illinois. Brill has also been a consultant on numerous tort cases.

Despite stepping down as Director of Legal Writing, Brill’s commitment to legal writing as a discipline and as a profession has remained constant and without equal. In 1993, Brill established the legal writing listserv which, similar to the Legal Writing Institute, enabled legal writing professionals to communicate on a daily basis concerning the enhancement of their programs. The listserv membership, which grew from a handful of individuals to over a thousand members within ten years, became instrumental in enhancing the solidarity of the professionals in the field and the overall quality of programs across the nation. Professor Brill was also an early leader and continues to be involved with the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD), which has been instrumental in politically solidifying legal writing professionals throughout the country.

In 1997, Brill along with Susan L. Brody, Christina L. Kunz, Richard K. Neumann, Jr., & Marilyn R. Walter, collaborated on the Sourcebook on Legal Writing Programs which compiled information on existing programs of legal writing and gave recommendations for optimal programs. Recommendations included suggestions on class sizes and commentary on the need to improve the status and salary of legal writing professionals in order to enhance skills training in general. The Sourcebook became a standard for schools attempting to improve their own legal writing programs and put the American Bar Association on notice that the future of the quality of legal education necessitated taking notice that legal writing was not an unnecessary add-on to legal education, but rather an integral part.

In late 1997, Brill was again instrumental in presenting information to the American Bar Association (ABA) and making a case that skills instructors in law schools should be given protections similar to other tenured professors, and that a failure to provide these protections should be considered in determining whether a law school should be accredited. The result was the ABA’s adoption of standard 405(c) which, although not equating legal writing professionals to the status of tenured law school faculty, put legal writing instructors on more of an equal footing with those who had been considered “regular” faculty.

Following the adoption of 405 (c), both the American Bar Association and law schools have begun to pay more attention to not only the status of the legal writing professional, but also to the quality of legal writing programs throughout the country. Currently, U.S. News and World Reports assesses the quality of legal writing programs when doing its annual rankings of law schools. The rankings of legal writing programs are based in part, on the status and security afforded legal writing professionals.

Brill continues to be active in the enhancement of the profession of legal writing while maintaining a full-time teaching load at Chicago-Kent. He has been, deservingly, the recipient of many awards for his commitment to Legal Education. In 1997, Brill was given the American Association of Law Schools Legal Writing, Research, and Reasoning section award for contributions to the profession of legal writing. In 2004, Brill received the Thomas L. Blackwell Memorial Award for his contributions to legal writing and legal education. In 2006, Brill received the Burton “Legends of the Law” Award for "outstanding contribution to legal writing education". In 2006, Chicago-Kent established its first endowed faculty chair and named it after Professor Ralph L. Brill. In 2007, Professor Brill and Professor Molly Lien (of John Marshall Law School) were awarded the first annual Terri LeClercq Award for Courage -- an award established to reward acts of courage in advancing causes related to legal writing.

Brill is a devoted environmentalist and frequent traveler to national zoos and parks.

External links

* [http://www.kentlaw.edu/faculty/rbrill/ Chicago-Kent biography]
* [http://www.lwionline.org/ Legal Writing Institute homepage]