January 14, 2010

Professor recognized for contributions to the legal writing field

Professor Steve Johansen received the top award granted in the legal writing community at the 2010 American Association of Law Schools annual meeting.

Professor Steve Johansen received the Blackwell Award at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools on January 7, 2010. The Blackwell Award is given to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to improve the field of legal writing by demonstrating the ability to nurture and motivate students to excellence, a willingness to help other legal writing educators improve their teaching skills and legal writing programs, and an ability to create and integrate new ideas for teaching and motivating legal writing educators and students.

In 2008, Johansen founded an applied storytelling conference for the legal writing community. In its second year, Johansen organized the conference titled Once Upon A Legal Time: Chapter Two at Lewis & Clark Law School. The conference brought 80 legal experts—practitioners, academics and students—from across the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore together to discuss effective storytelling.

In this podcast, Johansen discusses the convergence of storytelling and the legal profession and why effective storytelling is indeed a science.