Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Welcome! I'm so glad you're considering PL 108. This is an online (scheduled meetings) course that meets weekly via Zoom in the evenings. Attendance at the live class sessions is expected. This is a skills course, and you will get the most out of it by showing up, working through exercises with the class, and engaging with the material in real time.

Plan on roughly 9 to 12 hours per week for the coursework. There is no final exam. Your grade is built across attendance and participation, eight sets of weekly grammar quizzes, a grammar final, four homework assignments, the staged objective memo process (worksheet, outline, draft, and required conference), and the final memo itself.

What this course is. PL 108 is where you learn how legal professionals actually think, read, and write. Across the term you will read common law cases, criminal law cases, and constitutional law cases, as well as statutes, because the goal is to give you experience with a wide variety of legal sources to interpret. You will break statutes apart into their elements, build rules from synthesized authority, apply those rules to facts, and produce the written analysis that supervising attorneys, judges, and clients rely on. By the end of the term you will have written a complete objective memorandum of law analyzing a real legal question. That memo is the deliverable every other piece of the course builds toward.

The framework. The framework we use is IRAC: Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion. IRAC is the written language of legal analysis. Every memo, every brief, every court opinion you will ever read is built on it. Once you can write in IRAC, you can read legal writing more efficiently, talk to legal professionals more clearly, and produce work that you and your supervisors can effectively use. You will not be expected to know any of this when you arrive. You will be expected to practice it.

The hidden curriculum. The law reflect choices about which questions the law can ask, whose interests get centered, and where the analysis stops. Developing the skill of legal writing is the explicit work of this course. Learning to see what that formula does, what it includes and excludes, what counts as a legal question and what falls outside the frame, is the implicit work. We do both in this class.

Grammar. This course also includes a substantial grammar component. Legal writing is unforgiving about grammar in a way most other writing is not, because a misplaced modifier or a pronoun with no clear antecedent can change the legal meaning of a sentence. We use the Connected Quizzing program through Casebook Connect to build this foundation, with four quizzes due before each class for eight weeks, plus a grammar final.

Required texts. You will need two books for this course:

• Introduction to Law for Paralegals: A Critical Thinking Approach, 8th edition, by Katherine A. Currier, Thomas E. Eimermann, and Marisa S. Campbell (Aspen Publishing, 2023). ISBN: 9781543858471. This is our primary textbook, and it comes bundled with Connected Quizzing access through Casebook Connect, which we use throughout the term for the grammar quiz program.
• A Lawyer Writes: A Practical Guide to Legal Analysis, 4th Edition, by Coughlin,  Malmud, and Patrick Rocklage.

Please buy the Currier text new, or confirm with the seller that the Connected Quizzing access code is included and unused; otherwise you will need to purchase the quizzing program separately for the grammar component of the course, which is worth 32% of your grade. Used copies of A Lawyer Writes are fine.

If you are unable to purchase these materials, please let me know. All other readings, including statutes, cases, and supplementary handouts, are provided through D2L at no cost.

A note on AI. This course has a very clear and strict academic integrity policy on AI usage. Please read the syllabus.

About your instructor. I'm Megan Dorton, a licensed Oregon attorney and faculty member in PCC's Paralegal Program. I practice in family, housing, and administrative law, and I came to PCC to help train future legal professionals to increase access to justice. I love this course and I look forward to working with you. You can reach me anytime at megan.dorton@pcc.edu.