Cross-Generational Influence in Legal Writing: Getting Started

I teach legal writing primarily and have for the past 11 1/2 years. However, my primary research interest is cross-generational influence and cross-generational competence (the nice thing about being one of the first to write about something in legal education is that you get to make up what it's called). So the filter I tend to see most things through is a generational one.

Recently, I've been thinking about the generations in legal writing. What's interesting to me is seeing the generational influence in a relatively new field of law teaching. In the next few weeks, I'll explore here the influences primarily of Boomers and Xers in legal writing.

My basic premise is this, though: while the field of legal writing tends to be cohesive, the rifts that do occur seem to head down several fairly predictable fault lines (a couple of which even I won't touch publicly). One of those is a generational fault line. And it's not just any fault line; it's one that tends to be pretty volatile. The gap between Boomers and Xers is not only large because of the characteristics of those particular generations; it's also large because it also straddles the pre- and post-technology revolution line. In a field as new as legal writing, it's expected that progress will be marked in some respects by how well this very young field is able to navigate the political landscape of a very old profession. So those who strategize for this new field's success necessarily do so within their own framework of how youth (the new) deals with authority (the established). Ideas of what makes someone authoritative and how much deference one should give to authority vary widely between the Boomers and the Xers.

Next up: some foundational information about Boomers