Joan Magat
Senior Lecturing Fellow

 

Joan Ames Magat is general editor for Duke Law School’s Law & Contemporary Problems journal and teaches two legal-writing seminars for second- and third-year law students — Legal Writing: Craft & Style, and Judicial Writing. She is the author of The Lawyer’s Editing Manual (Carolina Academic Press 2009).

Before attending law school, Professor Magat taught literature and composition at various colleges and universities in North Carolina and elsewhere. She later clerked, sequentially, for a number of justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court, including the then-chief justice. Her experience since has included work as a legal editor on Professor Arthur Larson’s workers’ compensation and employment-discrimination treatises, and legal writing and editing for a firm in private practice and the North Carolina Institute of Government. She joined the legal writing faculty at Duke Law School in 2000 and became L&CP’s General Editor in 2002.

Professor Magat holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University and earned her JD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1982.

Joan Magat

Recent Courses

Extended Faculty
Legal Writing Faculty
Adjunct Faculty