Poetic License: Using Documentary Poetry to Teach International Law Students Paraphrase Skills

In this article, I show how the study of the poems of Charles Reznikoff – a 20th century American lawyer – helps teach the critical art of paraphrase to International law students, lawyers from The Temple’s LLM Program. Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of teaching paraphrase to students from civil law countries, acknowledging that it too often results in patchwriting or mere recitation, drained of any text-based policy analysis. Drawing on the fields of ESL, Composition, and Legal Writing, I show how the study of the poetry helps my student learn US-style legal writing. We use the poetry of Reznikoff, who, during the 20th century, wrote poems about reported cases in which race played a dominant role. The students summarize Reznikoff’s poems into prose form and reported cases into poetry. Moving from one genre to another enhances the students’ paraphrase skills, which they then apply to a modern search and seizure problem raising the issue of racial profiling. The students now demonstrate improved paraphrase skills and are more familiar with policy analysis – skills that will greatly enhance their ability to practice law. Students in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences – any field that values critical thinking and writing – will also benefit learning these skills