Fajans Elizabeth Photo

Elizabeth Fajans

Associate Professor of Legal Writing Emerita
Phone
(718) 780-7989
Education
M.A., Ph.D., Rutgers University
B.A., Sarah Lawrence College

Biography

Elizabeth Fajans' book, co-authored with Professor Walter, Writing and Analysis in the Law, is in its seventh edition and is a widely used first-year legal writing text for law students. She is also the author or co-author of Scholarly Writing for Law Students, in its fifth edition, and Writing for Law Practice, in its third edition. Her scholarly interests and lectures have focused on rhetoric and the law. Her article “Against the Tyranny of Paraphrase: Talking Back to Texts” in the Cornell Law Review is co-authored with Professor Falk and was the first call for critical reading pedagogy in law school. Fajans was awarded the 2010 recipient of the AALS section award for Legal Writing, Research, and Analysis for significant lifetime contributions to the field of legal writing.
 
Professor Fajans was an Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Committee Member and affiliated with the Center for Law, Language & Cognition. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Legal Writing Institute monograph series and has been on the Board of the Legal Writing Institute and on the editorial board of the Journal of Legal Writing. She was also a representative to the Association of Legal Writing Directors.
 
Prior to joining the faculty in 1984, she taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rutgers University.
Publications