Elizabeth Fajans is the Law School’s writing specialist. Her book co-authored with Professor Walter, Writing and Analysis in the Law, is in its sixth edition and is a widely used first-year legal writing text for law students. She is also the author or co-author of other books about writing in the legal field. 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 was co-authored the 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 is an
Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Committee Member and is affiliated with the
Center for Law, Language & Cognition. She is on the editorial board 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 is 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.