The objective of the course on Legal Writing and Skills to teach students those essential skills in academic legal writing, in particular, how to identify a topic worthy of legal research, the skills in both descriptive and analytical writing, skills in formulating a reasoned argument.

This course will be a hands-on course in which students are expected to actively participate in the course by rewriting their proposal and come up at the end of this course with a written chapter one of their respective theses.

In 8-9 lectures, the instructors will teach some basic skills which are essential for dissertation writing. Sample journal articles and past JSD dissertations will be analysed to illustrate how those skills can be and have been applied. Students will be assigned to do intensive reading of books and articles relevant to their theses thereafter. In the remaining 4-5 lectures, students will be asked to present their writings, which will be used as examples to discuss how those writings can be further improved and what additional research work needs to be undertaken in order to come up with improvements.

Through such continuous practice over one semester, students are expected to master the necessary academic writing skills.