Members of the national Legal Writing Institute (LWI) have elected Professor Kim Chanbonpin to serve as president of the organization in 2016. Chanbonpin will first serve a two-year term as president-elect.
The election came at the group’s 16th biennial conference in Philadelphia. Chanbonpin has been serving with fellow John Marshall Professor Mark E. Wojcik on LWI’s Board of Directors. She is the first John Marshall professor to hold the presidency of LWI.
Associate Dean Anthony Niedwiecki, director of John Marshall’s nationally ranked Lawyering Skills Program, said Chanbonpin’s appointment “reflects the great respect that our academic community has for the work she has done. In just the past few years, Kim has been a leader on diversity issues in the academy; helped the legal writing community collaborate with the Society of American Law Teachers; worked on a task force that lobbies the American Bar Association on issues in legal education; and served as a board member for LWI.“
The 2,800-member Legal Writing Institute focuses on an exchange of ideas about legal writing and provides a forum for research and scholarship about legal writing and legal analysis. Chanbonpin will serve as president-elect from 2014-2016 and will take the president’s role and lead the 17th biennial conference in 2016. She will serve as president for two years.
This is the second leadership honor for Chanbonpin. She also is serving a three-year term on the Board of Governors for the Society of American Law Teachers. She has been a presenter and writer on issues of diversity for a variety of programs over the past several years.
Chanbonpin joined John Marshall’s faculty in 2008. She teaches Lawyering Skills; Criminal Law; Torts; Gender, Race and Class; and National Security Law.
John Marshall faculty have played ongoing, key roles with the Legal Writing Institute and within the legal writing world. LWI conference members gave special recognition to John Marshall Professor Susan Brody for her work as a founding board member of LWI in 1984. Brody started her career at John Marshall as a legal writing instructor and was instrumental in persuading her colleagues to institute a four-semester required writing program and give regular tenure track status to all those who taught in the program. John Marshall established its program using her guidelines. Today, its Lawyering Skills Program is ranked No. 2 in the country by U.S. News& World Report.
Brody also co-authored Legal Drafting, one of the first-of-its-kind books that helped shape the curriculum of drafting courses nationwide.
