Joan Malmud Rocklin

Legal Research and Writing Professor
Director of Externships and Clinics

Joan Rocklin earned her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of law, graduating order of the coif. She had her first opportunity to teach legal research and writing, when she was selected to be a legal writing instructor to a group of 12 first-year law students at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, she was also an editor for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

After law school, Professor Rocklin clerked for the Honorable William W Schwarzer, a position that allowed her to work on cases from the Ninth Circuit, the Third Circuit, and the Northern District of California. Afterward, she returned to her home state of New York, working in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. There, she worked on complex international litigation, often involving allegations of anti-trust violations and fraud.

Professor Rocklin joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2001. She teaches Legal Research and Writing I and II and an upper level writing class, Intensive Writing. She is active in the national legal writing organizations. At the 2008 Legal Writing Institute's biennial conference she trained dozens of new legal writing professors in the fine art of critiquing student work. She was also the 2008-09 secretary for the Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research section of the Association of American Law Schools. Now, she is coordinating the programming for the next biennial conference of the Legal Writing Institute.

She and two colleagues published A Lawyer Writes, a textbook for first-year law students. The textbook helps law students develop their legal analysis and writing skills by placing them in the role of a new associate.

Since moving to Oregon, Professor Rocklin has taken to the mountains, where she hikes, skis, and (thanks to the prodigious on-slope teaching talents of Associate Dean Michael Moffitt) snowboards.