Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Malin, Martin H.

Ginsberg, Deborah I.

English

Flipping the Classroom to Teach Workplace ADR in an Intensive Environment

Woo, Margaret Y.K.

Paul, Jeremy R.

653
From the Editors 
We hope you are reading this issue in some beautiful, off-campus locale and 
that you are finding summer the perfect time to reflect on the heart of what 
we do. This volume takes up foundational issues in legal education, including 
law school financing, 50 ways to promote teaching and learning, and racialized 
interactions in the classroom. We also tackle contemporary issues such as 
experiential deaning, a model code of conduct for law journal submissions, 
and faculty sexual misconduct. Selective implementation of any or all of the 
articles’ recommendations could well improve the law school environment.
We begin with “Exploring the Meaning of Experiential Deaning” by Margaret 
Martin Barry, Robert D. Dinerstein, Phyllis Goldfarb, Peggy Maisel and Linda 
Morton. In 2017, these five authors surveyed American law schools to gain a 
more complete picture of the appointment, work, role and accomplishments 
of those in the new position of experiential dean. The survey results suggest 
that a clearer statement of the experiential dean’s job is warranted, including a 
clearer description of the position within the law school’s governance structure. 
They also make a compelling case for greater levels of support.
In 1999, the JLE published an important article by James Lindgren, “Fifty 
Ways to Promote Scholarship,” for law schools seeking to improve the quality and 
quantity of faculty scholarly output. Gerald Hess, Michael Hunter Schwartz, 
and Nancy Levit follow with their “Fifty Ways to Promote Teaching and Learning.” 
This succinct and (almost) inclusive list richly deserves careful reading, study, 
and certainly, selective implementation. Scott Dodson and Jacob Hirsch, 
meanwhile, in answer to the consistent complaint about the submission 
process with student edited law journals, propose a model code of conduct 
for editors and authors in “A Model Code of Conduct for Student-Edited Law Journal 
Submissions.” 
With its 2008 launch, University of California Irvine School of Law (UCI 
Law) instituted a tuition remission program for its first three cohorts (class 
of 2012 — full tuition remission; class of 2013 — half remission; class of 2014 
— one third remission), as a means of attracting students to the school while 
awaiting accreditation. Stephen Boutcher, Anna Raup-Kounovsky & Carroll 
Seron advantageously collected data from this natural experiment to evaluate 
the impact of tuition remission on law student decision-making around debt 
accrual and at career launch. The authors, in “Financing Legal Education Through 
Student Loans: Results from a Quasi-Experiment in Tuition Remission” found that 1) fear of 
debt remains a significant factor for all cohorts in predicting debt; but perhaps, 
more surprisingly, social background characteristics are not significant; 2) 
that tuition remission, regardless of need and across the board, appears to 
influence the behavior of all students to be more conservative in borrowing; 
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 67, Number 3 (Spring 2018)
654 Journal of Legal Education
and 3) financing legal education with debt indeed has important consequences 
for professional career trajectories. These results have implications for all law 
schools evaluating their policies on law school financing.
Erin Lain revisits the issue of the classroom-learning environment in her 
article “Racialized Interactions in the Law School Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches to 
Creating a Safe Learning Environment,” exploring how to lead conversations about 
race. In “Abuse of Freedom: Balancing Quality and Efficiency in Faculty Title IX Processes.” 
Brian Pappas examines how faculty sexual misconduct complaints are handled 
(mishandled) in three public universities’ procedures. Nancy Soonpaa turns 
the administrative task of writing a syllabus into a pedagogical tool in “The Ins 
and Outcomes of Writing an Effective Syllabus,” and Patrick Barry takes a whimsical 
look at the “The Infinite Power of Grammar.”
Completing this volume is Margaret Kwoka’s Legends commemorating the 
recently departed Hope L. Lewis, who had graced the legal academy with 
her cutting edge scholarship and mentorship. Three book reviews round out 
our issue: the amazingly prescient Supreme Courtship: A Novel (Twelve, 2008) by 
Christopher Buckley is reviewed by Jonathan R. Siegel; Dan Urman reviews 
Michael Meltsner’s new memoir, With Passion: An Activist Lawyer’s Life (Twelve 
Tables Press, 2017); and Renee Lerner reviews Amalia D. Kessler, Inventing 
American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 
(Yale University Press, 2017). Enjoy!  
Margaret Y.K. Woo 
Jeremy Paul 


From the Editors

Kwoka, Margaret B.

Hope Lewis: Refuse the Ride

Soonpaa, Nancy J.

The Ins and Outcomes of Writing an Effective Syllabus

Welch Wegner, Judith

Law School Assessment in the Context of Accreditation: Critical Questions, What We Know and Don’t Know, and What We Should Do Next

Bell, Bernard W.

Book Review of Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law by Stephen Presser

Urman, Dan

Book Review of With Passion: An Activist Lawyer’s Life by Michael Meltsner

Barry, Patrick

853
The Infinite Power of Grammar
Patrick Barry
“Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.”
   —Molière
“At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the 
way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the 
right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in 
conveying animage or an idea.” 
   
— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg1
Good lawyers know that effective advocacy requires more than just choosing 
the right words; it also requires choosing the right word order. The formal 
term for this choice is “syntax.” But perhaps a better description comes from a 
1976 essay by Joan Didion called “Why I Write.”2 
In it, Didion draws a helpful parallel between the arrangement of a 
photograph and the arrangement of a sentence. “To shift the structure of a 
sentence,” she notes, “alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and 
inflexibly as the position of the camera alters the meaning of the object 
photographed.”3 Didion refers to this phenomenon as grammar’s “infinite 
power,”4 a phrase that captures just how transformative word order can be. 
Imagine, for example, you are preparing to move. Your boxes are packed. 
Your rugs are rolled. Your U-Haul is all gassed up and ready to go. Now you 
1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living, N.Y. Times, Oct. 1, 2016, https://
www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-advice-for-living.
html?_r=0 (emphasis added).
2. Joan Didion, Why I Write, N.Y. Times Book Rev., Dec. 5, 1976, at 2 (The title is taken from 
an essay of the same name written by George Orwell in 1946: George Orwell, Why I Write, 
4 GaNGRel (1946); see also The ColleCTed essaYs, JouRNalism aNd leTTeRs of GeoRGe 
oRwell: aN aGe like This 1920-1940 1-7 (Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus eds., 1968); GeoRGe 
oRwell, a ColleCTioN of essaYs 309 (1981)).
3. Didion, supra note 3, at 2.
4. Id.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 67, Number 3 (Spring 2018)
Patrick Barry is Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He 
thanks for helpful comments on an earlier draft Ramzi Abboud, Julie Aust, Dave Babbe, Dan 
Dalton, Shai Dothan, Samir Hanna, Hannah Hoffman, Eva Foti Pagán, Ben Preyss, Tim Pinto, 
Mansoor Qureshi, Helen Ryan, Joel Richert, and Vivek Sankaran. 
At the Lectern
854 Journal of Legal Education
just need somebody to help you lug the heavy stuff. So you text a friend and 
receive one of two responses:
“I’d love to help, but my parents are in town.”
OR 
“My parents are in town, but I’d love to help.”
In many ways, both responses are the same. Both contain the same marks of 
punctuation: a comma and a period. Both contain the same number of words: 
ten.5 Both even contain the same exact words. There is no word in “I’d love to 
help, but my parents are in town” that is not in “My parents are in town, but 
I’d love to help.” And there is no word in “My parents are in town, but I’d love 
to help” that is not in “I’d love to help, but my parents are in town.” The only 
difference is the order of those words. The only difference is syntax.
Yet that difference, in this case and many others, can be substantial. It’s the 
difference between your request being met with what seems like a No (“I’d 
love to help, but my parents are in town”) or with what seems like a Yes (“My 
parents are in town, but I’d love to help”). It’s the difference between a job 
offer (“More than 500 people applied for this job, but we would really like to 
hire you”) and a job snub (“We would really like to hire you, but more than 
500 applied for this job.”). It’s even the difference between the end to a good 
first date (“I am leaving the country next week, but I’d love to do this again.”) 
and the end to a dud (“I’d love to do this again, but I am leaving the country 
next week.”) 
Knowing this difference, knowing the infinite power of grammar, good 
lawyers will always think about how the order of words can be flipped and 
shifted. They won’t limit their edits to deletion and insertion. “Cut” and “add” 
are not the extent of their skill sets. They’ll also edit by reconfiguration, by 
keeping the content but changing its location, by imagining new combinations 
and sequences, by not treating the structure they inherit as fixed. 
Take this sentence from a criminal case involving the Confrontation Clause, 
the part of the Sixth Amendment that gives criminal defendants the right to 
cross-examine—or “confront”—the witnesses who testify against them.6 The 
sentence comes from a brief written by two students in the Federal Appellate 
Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School: “The district court erred 
when it admitted out-of-court statements from an unidentified declarant 
5. Or eleven if you count the contraction “I’d” as two words instead of one. See, e.g., Paul 
TaYloR, TexT-To-sPeeCh sYNThesis 60 (2009) (“While it is common in natural-language 
parsing to expand contractions and regard them as two words . . . they are spoken exactly 
as a single word would be, and for this reason we regard all these forms as single words.”) 
(emphasis in original).
6. u.s. CoNsT. amend. VI (“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to 
… be confronted with the witnesses against him.”).
855
implicating Mr. Richard in the crime in violation of Mr. Richard’s Sixth 
Amendment rights.”
A lot of things can be done to improve this sentence. But we might start 
by simply reordering the words. The important thing to stress in this case is 
that Mr. Richard’s Sixth Amendment rights were violated. So why not start 
with that directly? “In violation of Mr. Richard’s Sixth Amendment rights, 
the district court erred when it admitted out-of-court statements from an 
unidentified declarant implicating Mr. Richard in the crime.”
No word was added to the sentences the students originally wrote. No word 
was removed. But the sentence is already much clearer and more compelling. 
A similar transformation can be performed on this hilariously misguided 
sentence collected as an example of bad writing in Plain English for Lawyers: “The 
defendant was arrested for fornicating under a little-used state statute.”7
To avoid the impression that the defendant used the statute as a blanket and 
was caught actually fornicating beneath it, we might invert the sentence: “Under 
a little-used state statute, the defendant was arrested for fornicating.”
The word “under” may continue to create problems for some readers. But 
the contrast between the original version and the edited version does seem 
to show that word order, just like word choice, really can change the world 
people see.
The magazine The Economist has figured this out. Playing with the common 
phrase “Great minds think alike,” it created a clever ad campaign out of the 
following inversion:
Great minds like a think.
This slogan perfectly targets The Economist’s audience, while at the same 
time communicating a lot about the magazine’s own ethos: witty, worldly, 
intellectual, and also a bit irreverent. It’s an excellent piece of advocacy. And 
all the magazine did was rearrange some words.
***
Of course, rearranging words isn’t always an easy task. An anecdote about 
the literary giant James Joyce demonstrates this point. The anecdote has been 
told in many places, including the memoir of another literary giant, Stephen 
King.8 It’s a good reminder of how much care and energy the best writers put 
into finding the right syntax and taking full advantage of the infinite power 
of grammar.
7. Richard C. Wydick, Plain English for Lawyers, 66 Cal. l. Rev. 727, 747 (1978). 
8. sTePheN kiNG, oN wRiTiNG: a memoiR of The CRafT 151 (2000), see also, e.g., fRaNk 
BudGeN, James JoYCe aNd The makiNG of ulYsses 9-22 (1934) (reprinted in James JoYCe: 
iNTeRviews & ReColleCTioNs 77 (E.H. Mikhail ed., 1990)), huGh keNNeR, ulYsses 5 n.12 
(1987).
The Infinite Power of Grammar 
856 Journal of Legal Education
The anecdote begins with a visit from one of Joyce’s friends. Joyce doesn’t 
get up to greet the friend. Instead he stays slumped over his writing desk, 
pouty and dejected after an apparently frustrating day of writing. The friend 
asks Joyce what’s wrong. Joyce doesn’t respond. The friend then guesses it 
might have something to do with Joyce’s literary output that day. So he asks 
Joyce how many words Joyce wrote since starting in the morning.
“Seven,” Joyce says. 
Aware that Joyce is the kind of wordsmith that labors over every single 
word, the friend tries to be encouraging. “Seven is pretty good,” he says, “at 
least for you.” 
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Joyce says, not entirely consoled. “But I still don’t 
know what order they go in!”
***
Good lawyers will try to avoid Joyce’s level of obsessiveness. They have 
deadlines to meet, assignments to start, sanity to preserve. Yet they will 
nevertheless make time for exploring and playing with the infinite power 
of grammar. Given the importance of syntax—in contracts, briefs, e-mails, 
articles, and all other forms of writing—they can’t afford not to. As Didion 
says elsewhere in “Why I Write,” with characteristic brevity and force: “The 
arrangement of the words matters.”9 
Questions
(1) Criminal Sentencing: Suppose you are representing a woman 
convicted of a crime. We’ll call her Ms. Prynne. When it comes time 
to sentence Ms. Prynne, the judge could say one of either two things.
A. “Look, I think you genuinely are sorry for the harm you have 
caused, Ms. Prynne, and I think you are really committed to being 
a productive member of society—but the crime you committed 
warrants a significant punishment.”
B. “Look, the crime you committed warrants a significant punishment—
but I think you genuinely are sorry for the harm you have caused, 
and I think you are really committed to being a productive member 
of society.”
• Which statement do you think your client is hoping for?
9.  Didion, supra note 3, at 2.
857
(2) The Syntax of Sports: Buddy Ryan is famous among football fans 
for creating the “46 defense,” a positioning scheme so dominant that 
many consider the 1985 Chicago Bears team that used it to be the 
best ever. Yet there is a way to think of Ryan’s innovation as a simple 
move of syntax. He didn’t add any players to the eleven each team is 
allowed on the field at a team. Nor did he remove any players. All he 
did was rearrange how they lined up. 
Can you think of other examples where “the infinite power of grammar” 
might be applied to non-writing examples? 
• What about interior decorating? 
• What about food presentation? 
• What about the way a courtroom or chemistry lab is set up? 
Is there a syntax of science? A syntax of engineering? A syntax of 
management, medicine, or math?
(3) Child Custody: A law student the University of Michigan Law 
School was representing a Colombian mother in a custody dispute. 
The student originally wrote this sentence to help persuade the judge 
that the mother is not a flight risk.
Other than Mr. Macondo’s unsubstantiated fear, there is no 
evidence that Ms. Macondo will flee to Colombia, a country she 
was desperate to leave, with Lucas.
Suppose you think it is a little confusing and awkward to put “with Lucas” 
at the end of the sentence. Without adding or deleting words, how would you 
use the infinite power of grammar to instead end the sentence with “desperate 
to leave”?  
The Infinite Power of Grammar
858 Journal of Legal Education
(4) Civil Procedure: One of the most-cited cases ever decided by the 
Supreme Court is Ashcroft v. Iqbal.10 It, along with its common companion 
Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly,11 fundamentally reshaped the formal 
complaints lawyers initially bring in federal court. Here’s a sentence 
from the Iqbal decision: “To prevail on that theory, the complaint must 
contain facts plausibly showing that petitioners purposefully adopted 
a policy of classifying post-September-11 detainees as ‘of high interest’ 
because of their race, religion, or national origin.”
The next sentence in the decisions could have been written at least two 
ways. 
(a) “This the complaint fails to do.”
(b) “The complaint fails to do this.”
• Why might you go with the first option?
• Why might you go with the second?
• Which do you think the author of the majority opinion, Justice 
Anthony Kennedy, opted for? 
(5) Protective Order: Consider these two approaches to explaining why 
the plaintiff thinks the judge should issue a protective order and not 
allow the defendants to use as evidence the contents of an errantly 
sent e-mail.
“The plaintiff claims that because the information was sent as a 
result of an auto-fill error and he requested the documents to be 
destroyed, he is entitled to have the protective order granted.”
“The plaintiff claims that he is entitled to have the protective 
order granted because the information was sent as a result of an 
auto-fill error and he requested the documents to be destroyed.”
• Which version do you think is more effective? Why?
10. 556 U.S. 662 (2009).
11. 550 U.S. 544 (2007).
859
Examples
(1)   Point of View: “My elbow grazed her breast. Or her breast grazed  
my elbow, whatever your point of view.” 
—Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor (2010)
(2)  Poet Laureate: “[Billy] Collins’ revisions suggest an orderly process 
of refinement and improvement. The process continued, as you can 
see if you consult the final version of the poem as published under 
the title ‘In the Evening,’ in The New Delta Review. Almost every line 
has been changed from this manuscript, usually in subtle ways. For 
example, ‘I pick up a knife and an onion’ has become, ‘I pick up an 
onion and a knife.’ Better, no?”
—Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page (2005)
(3)  Google:“When the company was smaller, we drew a public distinction 
between two levels of director, where the more junior role would be 
titled as Director, Engineering, and the more senior role would be 
Engineering Director. We found that even such a subtle distinction as 
the word order of the title caused our people to fixate on the difference 
between the levels. So we eliminated the difference.”
—Laszlo Bock, Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google  
    that Will Transform How You Live and Lead (2005)
(4)  Grammar as Style: “All syntax can do, and it is a very great deal, is to 
make the right word shine to its best advantage, as brightly as possible 
and in just the right place, set off from others or clustered with them.”
—Virginia Tufte, Grammar as Style (1971)
(5)  Stephen Colbert: “And to combat these Grade ‘A’ bad eggs, we’ve 
created The Greatest Criminal Justice System on Earth as seen eight 
times a day on TNT in the various Laws & Orderses. Mind you, the 
police—’Order’—technically do their job before the prosecutors apply 
the ‘Law.’ So it should really be called ‘Order & Law.’ Show creator 
Dick Wolf really shanked that one.
—Stephen Colbert, America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never 
Weren’t (2012)
The Infinite Power of Grammar


The Infinite Power of Grammar

Duhart, Olympia

The ‘F’ Word: The Top Five Complaints (and Solutions) About Formative Assessment

Harrison, Jeffrey L.

What Did They Know and When Did They Know It? Pretesting as a Means Setting a Baseline for Assessing Learning Outcomes

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