Amicus Partners

The Amicus Interviews are meant for broader discussions on legal education, and the legal profession at the global level. Along with the legal research and law schools, these interviews are meant to bring across a slightly “macro” perspective on things.

Over the last two decades, Professor Stephen Horowitz has, in no particular order, created a comic strip on bankruptcy lawyers, taught English to high school students in Japan, worked as as a lawyer specialising in bankruptcy laws, and built the Legal English program at St John’s School of Law.

Currently at Georgetown Law as a Professor of Legal English, Prof. Horowitz shares his journey as a student, lawyer, and teacher, and what it takes to teach and learn Legal English. 

I have to start with “Bankruptcy Bill” – how did this idea come about? How did you team up with Gideon? Any particular highlight that you wish to share when it comes to setting up and publishing this comic strip? Lastly, any chance of a revival?

Gideon Kendall was (and is) one of my closest friends. We’ve played ultimate frisbee together since 1999. And he’s a professional illustrator and cartoonist. I was working at the time with a company that worked on an aspect of corporate bankruptcies. And our business came by referrals from bankruptcy lawyers representing debtors. I was asked to take on a business development role, which was way outside my comfort zone. And I was looking for a way to give myself something to talk about with people and help our company stand out.

I realized I was always good at creating content and also noticing and capturing cultures. Especially niche or esoteric cultures. So, I decided it would be fun to try and capture the culture of bankruptcy. Initially the intended audience was the big law firm bankruptcy world. But we started developing a following among the consumer bankruptcy lawyer community, and that’s when we started leaning into the BAPCPA Man character and the Mortgantua character.

I had so much fun doing the Bankruptcy Bill cartoon and collaborating with Gideon. Other than my children, I think it might be my favorite thing that I’ve ever created! I later found out that some judges and bankruptcy law professors, among others, were big fans. I never really figured out a good way to turn it into consistent income, though. And Gideon at a certain point got too busy with his own fantastic work. And I haven’t worked in bankruptcy law in a while now.

But if there were sufficient incentive, I would love to be able to pick it up and build on what we started. One project I never got to, for example, was to create a children’s book with the ABC’s of bankruptcy. Though these days a legal English course on bankruptcy would be a more likely candidate.

How did your interest in language play out as a law student? Had you already begun contemplating a career where the language and the law intersected?

I started law school at Duke after spending two years living in Japan working as an Assistant Language Teacher on the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) Program. My initial thought was that I would somehow combine law with my Japanese language and cultural knowledge. And I very much gravitated to the international LLM students as I was craving the kind of cross-cultural interactions and friendships I had experienced in Japan.

However, after interviewing with some law firms in which I talked frequently about my Japan interest, one interviewer was kind enough to explain that by that time, the Japanese economy had cooled down and any Japan-related experience was a nice-to-have but shouldn’t be my focus if I wanted to get hired.

As a result, I began downplaying my experience in Japan and really moved away from that as part of my identity. And that was unfortunate because that  was my interest and identity and something I excelled at. Yet I spent the next 10 years suppressing it.

How did you end up with both a Juris Doctorate (JD) and a Masters in TESOL?

I worked in law-related jobs for about ten years, but knew I wanted to do something different but wasn’t clear what. I had started freelancing on the side, writing blog posts for lawyers among other things. And I decided to organize a JET Alumni Career Panel on freelancing. I had a few writers and translators/interpreters on the panel, and also a friend who was teaching ESL on a freelance basis at a private language school in Manhattan.

As I was moderating the panel and listening to my ESL teacher friend talk, it hit me that that’s what I really wanted to be doing.

I decided I needed to go back to ESL teaching, regardless of whatever it paid, because if I did something I truly enjoyed, I would be much more successful and effective. And I had confidence that if I were feeling good about my work, I would be able to create my own opportunities.

That led me to first pursue a CELTA Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (offered by Cambridge University.) And then I decided it would make sense to pursue a Masters in TESOL because that would qualify me for better paying jobs in university ESL programs.

In the case of both, the CELTA and the MA TESOL, I initially decided to do them because I thought it was a ticket I needed to punch to access the opportunities I wanted. But to my surprise, they both taught me about teaching and linguistics in ways that opened my mind and completely changed my life and my understanding of teaching and language.

As I finished up my MA TESOL in NYC, I began calling around to New York-area law schools to see if there might be any needs for someone with my skill set. And when I called St. John’s Law School, it turned out at that moment they needed someone exactly like me to teach in and eventually to run their legal English program for international LLM students. And my instinct about myself proved on target: I thrived when doing something I genuinely enjoyed, and I was constantly innovating and figuring out ways to create and improve the teaching of legal English.

As I connected over time with others in the legal English field, I realized that this field defied easy categorization and that, like me, no one had it all figured out and everyone was experimenting and innovating, which makes it a wonderful community to be a part of.

And it was the process of connecting and communicating and exploring that led to being offered an opportunity to become part of the Legal English faculty at Georgetown Law, which was an honor as I knew it was the first US law school to establish a legal English program and I had always viewed it as the leader in the field.

Moving to the present,  what would you say have been some of the most challenging aspects of designing legal English courses? Moreover, any challenges that are particularly relevant to online teaching?

I think the biggest challenge is how to “Hide the ESL,” as one of my mentors, Craig Hoffman, likes to say. My approach to legal English has always been to teach law and legal skills, but in a way that makes it accessible for students and actually helps them improve their language ability. That is, it’s not just teaching law in English in a simpler way. And it’s not just using law-related topics and vocabulary to teach language.

It’s teaching them legal research and writing, or tort law or contract law or criminal procedure law and using actual cases and related legal texts as opposed to constructed legal English texts. And then teaching students to notice language in the texts that they need to build context so they can increase their comprehension.

In other words, giving them strategies for turning complex texts into comprehensible input. This process involves teaching them the discourse patterns of what they’re reading and then helping them notice the writing moves used in the discourse patterns, and then the language and grammar associated with those writing moves.

For example, one of the challenges of reading legal texts in a second language is that it can be harder to get context for what you’re reading. Our brains are subconsciously always making predictions as we read and then trying to confirm or deny those predictions. And that’s actually a major component of comprehension. When you read in a less familiar language, though, your brain often lacks all of the associated context information which in turn inhibits comprehension.

So, I focus a lot on strategies for building context when reading a legal text. And I connect those strategies to language.

By way of example, I teach students to “ruin the ending” when reading a court opinion. It’s not a mystery novel, I tell them. Don’t read it start-to-finish. Instead, look for the issue (i.e.,the question), the holding (i.e., the conclusion), and the rule of the case first so you know what the case is about. Then go back and read the facts.

And then I show them language clues for quickly finding these parts of the case. Some are vocabulary based, e.g., the issue almost always uses the word “whether” in it. Or the holding frequently uses first person plural (i.e, “we”). This kind of knowledge helps to narrow down the sentences with the most important information. And if you know the main question and the answer to that question, then you’ve built context for reading the rest of the case.

Additionally, awareness of verb tense can be valuable context. For example, rules always have a present tense main verb because they describe something that is always or generally true. And facts are described using past tense verbs because they’re things that already happened. In other words, if you can identify the tense of a main verb in a sentence, you can figure out what part of the case you might be looking at.

And that’s a valuable form of context.

As a result, preparing a legal English curriculum is an involved process of reviewing texts and identifying these kinds of discourse and language patterns relevant to comprehension. Because once I can provide the language knowledge to students and give them ways to practice using it, then the students have concrete, objective information they can use to build context and deeper comprehension of legal texts.

For online teaching I’d say the biggest challenge is engagement. Especially with regard to modules that require self-study, since a lot of online legal English curriculum involves contexts where there’s not a grade or other motivational consequence hanging over the students’ heads. Students are taking the course to prepare for an LLM or other program, to prepare for a bar exam, or as an elective (often non-credit.)

So, students have to understand what they’re getting and why they should spend time on a particular task. And the task needs to be compelling and provide a sense of immediate return on investment to keep the student motivated and sufficiently engaged to continue of their own volition. Especially when a smartphone with a world full of stimulating social media is  beckoning only a few inches away from their hand. And this is where having a student-centered teaching mentality can make such a big difference and impact on the students’ learning.

The other big challenge for online curriculum is user design and interface. Every detail needs to feel intuitive. You have to constantly ask yourself, “What are ways that someone could misunderstand this?” The wording of every instruction needs to be as clear and direct as possible, and any potential ambiguities scrubbed away.

As a prospective student, what can one expect from a course that you teach?

If you’re a student in my class, you will be engaged in active learning. I don’t view myself as a pitcher full of knowledge pouring it into the empty vessels of my students’ heads. I view myself as a facilitator of learning, adding in my own knowledge while also drawing out the knowledge and accumulated experience of students in the learning process.

I also view my class as a “community of learners.” People learn much better when they feel connected with the others in their learning group and understand how they can help each other learn from each other.

So, I make sure my students get to know each other from day one, and students are frequently engaged in in-class learning activities with other students in the class. In particular, I give students a lot of tasks that involve active noticing of language and discourse in the legal texts.

Students can also expect that their voices will be heard and respected in class. They will be challenged by me and they will also be expected to challenge me, as that is all part of the language of the law. 

And the last thing I’ll mention is that I always tell my students that when they’ve been a student with me once, then they’re my student for life. That is, they can always stay in touch and ask for help and advice with their learning, with their careers, and with life.

What exciting legal English projects have you been working on?

Over the past two years I’ve gotten heavily involved on a pro bono basis in providing legal English support for Afghan judges who have had to flee their country. And also for Ukrainian law schools and their students and faculty.

For Afghan judges, I’ve collaborated with Prof. Daniel Edelson of Seton Hall Law School, and the founder of USLawEssentials, and Prof. Lindsey Kurtz of Penn State Law School, to provide legal English assessments as well as online legal English course modules for those preparing to start an LLM program at a US law school. The three of us had already been developing a legal English assessment service for law schools and LLM students. And then an ABA member involved in a pilot program contacted me and mentioned needing assessment help, so we offered to help out. And that’s been a really terrific experience.

For Ukrainian law schools, Prof. Edelson and I had already developed online legal English course modules. And when we learned of the need for legal English at Ukrainian law schools, we taught semester-long courses for two different universities. Subsequently, I got more deeply involved when we learned that Ukrainian law faculty were interested in legal English training since they will need to teach their law courses in English in the next couple years.

So, I recruited others in the legal English community and, in collaboration with Artem Shaipov of the USAID Justice For All project, we’ve been doing a series of legal English training sessions for a cohort of about forty Ukrainian law professors from various universities.

I’ve also ended up being the point person at Georgetown Law for recruiting JD students to be matched with Ukrainian law students at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for a unique peer-to-peer legal writing project, where the Ukrainian students are tasked with writing a US-style legal memo, and the US law students serve as tutors and mentors. 

All of this work with Ukraine has kept me motivated to learn Ukrainian on Duolingo, where my streak is now over 450 days.

This is a bit of a silly question but what role does language play in the professional functioning of a lawyer? How can she make the best use of language?

In law more than any other field, words have power. So control over language is crucial. The better you understand a language, and the more you understand about language in general, the better control you have of that language.

Lastly, any advice for foreign trained lawyers to overcome difficulties in learning legal English?

First, you need to make mistakes to learn a language. Shifting to that mindset will make your language learning process more productive.

Second, if you’re trying to improve your speaking or writing, look for examples of the kind of language you want to be able to produce and then listen to, read, analyze, copy, and practice that language. For example, you don’t necessarily need to be able to speak like a TV news announcer or a lawyer making high-level arguments to the Supreme Court. But you might want to sound like a law-school educated person having a natural conversation about legal topics. That’s the main reason that Prof. Edelson and I created the USLawEssentials Law & Language podcast.

We pick a sophisticated legal topic and then have a conversation about it in a way that makes it accessible and easy to follow. Listening to something like that is a great way to develop an ear and a voice that will enable you to produce similar language in talking about legal topics.

Third, engage in extensive reading and listening. And that means find things to read or listen to that (1) you enjoy, and (2) are easy to comprehend (i.e., you know at least 90% of the vocabulary without using a dictionary.) This is how you build fluency and reading speed. It’s also the best way to build vocabulary. And equally important, it’s the best way to build background knowledge which is so crucial to comprehension in general. This is especially so in US legal culture, where court opinions are really stories, and they can be on any topic that you might encounter in life and in society.

As a lawyer in the US, you need to be familiar with science and literature and hospitals and accounting and sports and pop culture. Everything you know is helpful. So the more you read and listen, the more you know, the better a lawyer (or law student) you will be.

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