Mercer Law School Associate Professor Teri McMurtry-Chubb was named president of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) for the 2015-16 academic year. She is the first person of color to head of the organization.
“When I became president of ALWD on Aug. 1, I became the first person of color to ever head a national legal writing organization in the United States,” McMurtry-Chubb said. “I am thrilled to hold the position because it allows me the opportunity to better inform directors of writing programs about diversity issues as such issues impact their role as administrators at their respective law schools and in their development of legal communication curricula.”
AWLD is a non-profit professional association of directors of legal reasoning, research, writing, analysis and advocacy programs from law schools throughout the United States, Canada and Australia, consisting of more than 300 members representing more than 150 law schools.
The mission of ALWD is to pursue activities to help law schools provide excellent legal writing instruction, and the association is dedicated to improving legal education and the analytic, reasoning and writing abilities of lawyers. McMurtry-Chubb said, “My ultimate goal is to make ALWD a more diverse and inclusive organization for people of difference. I also hope to highlight our advocacy efforts for pay and status equity for legal writing professors nationally, as well as our work in training and mentoring leaders in the legal academy and in the legal profession.”
McMurtry-Chubb researches, teaches and writes in the areas of discourse analysis, genre analysis and rhetoric, critical legal studies, hegemony studies and legal history. She is the author of Legal Writing in the Disciplines, A Guide to Legal Writing Mastery. She has lectured nationally on structural workplace discrimination, disproportionate sentencing for African Americans, racial and gender inequalities in post-secondary education and African diasporic cultural forms.
