St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Patricia Montana presented at the Southeastern Regional Legal Writing Conference on April 21, 2018. Her presentation, Live and Learn: Live Critiquing and Student Learning, explored how to give “live” feedback in a way that best supports student writing.

Live critiquing is the process of giving students feedback on their written work “live,” rather than in writing, and at the same time as the professor is first reading the student’s work. This process gives students an opportunity to engage with their drafts, talk out their reasoning and writing decisions, and receive quick and individualized feedback. Through the presentation, Professor Montana discussed these benefits as well as some of the drawbacks of the technique, and offered modifications to help improve the experience for both the professor and student.

On April 12, 2018, Professor John Q. Barrett was one of 13,000 participants in this year’s International March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau, horrific sites in Poland of Nazi imprisonment, torture, enslavement, and extermination, primarily of Jews, during World War II.  

On the following day, Professor Barrett delivered a keynote lecture, “Justice Jackson and the Holocaust,” at a conference in Krakow, Poland, for lawyers, judges, academics, and others from the U.S. and other countries. The conference was co-sponsored by the International March of the Living, Rutgers Law School, and the New Jersey State Bar Association. For video, click here; Professor Barrett’s lecture begins around the 2:47:10 mark.

Professor Barrett is biographer of Justice Robert H. Jackson, U.S. chief prosecutor at and principal architect of the 1945-1946 international Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals. Professor Barrett writes The Jackson List, which reaches over 100,000 readers around the world.