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Jamie Abrams

What Passive Voice Teaches Us About Professional Identity Formation

By Jamie R. Abrams, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law

How often have you written the feedback “passive voice” in the margin of a student’s or novice lawyer’s paper, directing them toward the active voice? In some drafts, a reviewer might be able to critique nearly every sentence as passive voice! After twenty years of teaching Legal Research & Writing (LRW), I think we do our students a disservice to treat passive voice as a grammatical lapse. In my experience, it is more often an empowering invitation to have a conversation with students about professional identity.

In passive writing, the legal writer is describing events without naming who acted, who concluded, who argued, or who will decide. This passivity is often more about how the novice writer does not yet view themselves as a lawyer-in-training entitled to speak about the law. Many students, including first-generation students, may want to wait until they are more experienced to bring that degree of clarity because they have not had lawyers modeling this style of writing, but their readers are already counting on them to write with that kind of authority. It can be an empowering transformation in law school to realize that confident writing can come on day one in the supportive environment of the classroom and the supervisory relationship of early work experiences.

Passive voice can reveal that you are working with a student who has entered law school but has not yet been invited (passive voice intentional) to step into the role of someone qualified to speak about the law. Written work that confidently asserts that “the court held,” “the judge will decide,” or “the plaintiff argued” is exactly the substantive value-add that lawyers bring to clients. Lawyers help their readers digest content with ease and clarity because they name the actor and predict the arguments and actions. An early conversation with a novice writer inviting them to step into that role can go a long way to transform their writing – farther than the perennial “passive voice” markings of the red pen.

That same conversation can help novice writers see that there are times when the passive voice plays a strategic role. I still remember the day care “incident reports” that I received when my teething child had bitten another child, masterfully noting that “a friend was bitten,” perhaps softening the blow to my sleep-deprived psyche that it was my child who did the deed. In contrast, when novice writers rely on passive voice throughout, they aren’t accomplishing something; they’re avoiding something. Their readers are counting on them for clarity, and their supervisors entrusted them with the task. The next time our red pen is poised to flag “passive voice” yet again, we might instead start a conversation, one that cultivates the professional identity formation of every student through their writing.

Questions? Please email Jamie Abrams at jamieabrams@wcl.american.edu.

Jamie R. Abrams is Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. She has published scholarly articles about legal education pedagogy and won numerous awards for pedagogy innovations.

October 16, 2026 by hami3258

Jamie Abrams

Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It

By: Jamie R. Abrams, Professor of Law & Director of Legal Rhetoric Program,
American University, Washington College of Law

As scholars and teachers working in professional identity formation, blog readers may be interested to check out my recent book, titled Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It, published by the University of California Press. The book issues a call to action squarely centered in the Socratic classrooms that still dominate so much of legal education’s curricular core. The book’s premise is that existing legal education reforms, including ABA Standard 303(b) governing professional identity formation, are happening around the architectural and structural core of Socratic classrooms.

The book traces enduring scholarly critiques over the past fifty years of Socratic teaching’s professor-centered and power-centered approaches. It layers onto these critical perspectives the alarming wellness concerns facing modern law students and lawyers that scholars, such as the Holloran Center’s Co-Director Jerry Organ, have been documenting for years. With this body of literature outlined, the book ponders why we continue to innovate in legal education around the dominant Socratic classrooms. It notes how these traditional classrooms are often in tension with professional identity formation to the extent they put students in competition to be racked and stacked against each other, skewing students’ self-efficacy and creating a narrow band of skills and values rewarded in the classroom.

Notably, the book does not abandon the Socratic method, though, for reasons of pragmatism, economics, and institutional will. Rather, it seeks to build shared pedagogical values that catalyze these classrooms to align with other institutional reforms. The book therein proposes a set of concrete pedagogical values that can govern Socratic classrooms: student-centered, skills-centered, client-centered, and community-centered teaching techniques.

It then provides a roadmap of how to implement these shared pedagogical values. Simple techniques, like shifting from “what are the facts of the case?” and “what was the holding?” to an exploration of who hired a lawyer, why they hired a lawyer, and the skills and values deployed by that lawyer can transform the Socratic classroom to be more skills, student, client, and community focused. The book sketches out techniques, using existing student-teacher ratios and casebooks, to position students as professionals navigating a string of cases on behalf of a host of diverse clients in a range of communities. While Socratic classrooms might not be the primary site for cultivating professional identity formation, these pedagogical techniques sensitize students to professional skills and values in ways that align with deeper dives into professional identity formation happening in specialized classes, professional responsibility classes, experiential courses, simulations courses, and clinics. I warmly invite this community’s ongoing dialogue with these ideas. I hope this book offers a springboard into holistic institutional discussions about the pedagogical values that shape our institutions and the arc of student development from first year to graduation.

Please feel free to reach out to me at jamieabrams@wcl.american.edu if you have any questions or comments.

Jamie R. Abrams is Professor of Law and Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at American University Washington College of Law. She has published scholarly articles about legal education pedagogy and won numerous awards for pedagogy innovations.

June 21, 2024 by hami3258