I do acknowledge many of these arguments, and I've certainly heard plenty of horror stories about the various moot court advisers blowing up student briefs because the students weren't arguing specifically what the adviser had intended his or her charges to argue. Frustration is perhaps warranted.

On the other hand, we're 1Ls and this is the first stab at writing any sort of document that can be submitted to a court. Personally, I'm not very confident in my brief-writing ability at the moment - I'm worried enough about arguing persuasively, writing clearly and precisely, and formatting my brief properly. I don't know if I could sweat operating without too much restraint at this point, and I would assume that many of us feel like we're in the same boat. I, at least, am grateful that we have a set of "training wheels" in the form of restrictions about what we can argue so we can focus for the first time on making that argument.

I remember back when I was in tenth grade and we were learning to write our first five paragraph essays. The brightest students (that's you, Matthew) complained that they felt stifled by the ultra-restrictive form and topic stipulations. They were right of course, but there were students in the back of the room who could barely write at all (that's me, in this analogy) who were thankful that they could learn a little more slowly, and by senior year we were all finally free to run as we pleased so the brightest kids still had their time to shine in the end.

My opinion? There's time to be Perry Mason tomorrow, but I need to attain Hamilton Burger status first.

However, I should add that maybe there's room in the year for both a slow start and an opportunity for creativity at the finish. I don't know about others but legal practice workshop has been my favorite class so far - maybe we need to be writing much more and start off with the highly restrained tasks earlier in the year so that we're able to fly high this late in our second semester.

-- AndrewCascini - 24 Mar 2010