Over the next academic year, we will begin designing a new and best-in-class Center for Thinking, Researching, and Writing for all students. Our goals include:

• preparing students for the modern writing demands placed on new lawyers by the profession
• aiding students as they prepare for entry into a profession quickly being influenced and changed by the evolution of technology, particularly artificial intelligence
• helping students meet the new writing demands the NextGen Bar Exam will place on graduates

NYLS’s seven-credit, first-year Legal Practice curriculum introduces students to the foundational skills of critical thinking, researching, writing, and analysis as well as lawyering competencies like interviewing, counseling, and negotiation. Upper-level writing courses provide students with opportunities to build on and further cultivate these foundational skills after their first year of law school. Other settings at NYLS in which students can continue to grow as thinkers, researchers, writers, analysts, and communicators, throughout their law school journey include:

• internships and externships
• New York Law School Law Review and the Family Law Quarterly
• Moot Court Association, Dispute Resolution Team, and Trial Competition Team
• writing for news.nyls.edu

Through the new Center for Thinking, Researching, and Writing, NYLS aspires to inspire students to connect their development and transfer of knowledge, as well as professional development and professional identity formation, with excellence in writing.

During the 2023–24 academic year, we will be updating this page to include:

• a calendar of workshop offerings at NYLS related to thinking, researching, writing, Generative AI, and public speaking/communicating
• opportunities for satisfying the upper-level writing requirement and developing an ongoing writing portfolio of various genres of legal writing
• guidance on how students can engage in “writer identity formation” throughout their law school journey