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AwardsClick on the links below to read more about awards given by LWI. The 2010 Golden Pen Award:
At the recommendation of the Awards Committee, the LWI Board has voted to award the Golden Pen Award to William C. Burton, Esquire. Mr. Burton is currently a partner at the New York firm, Sagat Burton, LLP. He is a former New York State Assistant Attorney General, former New York State Assistant Special Prosecutor, and a former Director of Government Affairs for Continental Insurance. He has written the authoritative reference book Burton’s Legal Thesaurus (4th ed., 2006) and, in 2003, co-founded the Holmes Debates, which address major issues facing the nation and the judiciary. Mr. Burton is receiving the Golden Pen for all of those notable accomplishments, but he was nominated and selected mostly because he has become one of the most listened-to and melodic voices in the world of people who advocates for legal writing excellence. He created the Burton Foundation, a volunteer, not-for-profit, academic organization that concentrates on the relevance and importance of modernized legal writing. His foundation rewards and celebrates legal writing instruction and action. One of the foundation’s many activities is the annual Burton Awards, a national awards program dedicated principally to honoring effective legal writing, including plain-language efforts. The foundation has honored nearly 100 students for their outstanding writing and fifty or more lawyers who have written excellent articles or books. One nomination described the Burton Awards as “possibly legal writing’s most prestigious and public event in which to participate.” Mr. Burton has, said this nomination, “placed legal writing on a par with what the greatest judges and scholars do.” Past recipients of a Burton Award have included several of our own members. You may read more about the foundation and the awards at http://www.burtonawards.com/about.html. The LWI Board has also decided that this award should be presented at a time when as many of our own are able to celebrate and meet such an important contributor to legal writing. For that reason the award ceremony will take place this June at the LWI Biennial Conference. The 2010 Blackwell Award The 2010 Blackwell Award winner is Professor Steve Johansen. Professor Johansen is one of the most thoughtful and innovative members of the legal writing world. He served as the president of LWI during a time of great expansion. He is also a source of ideas for new innovations. Several of legal writing’s most important programs can be traced directly back to him. He worked on the first of our international conferences designed to support law professors teaching in countries that have emerging legal education systems. Professor Johansen also is a founder of the LWI “Writers Workshop,” which is an annual 3-day mentoring event for professors working on scholarship pieces. Most recently, Professor Johansen has become one of the leaders of the lawyering sub-discipline, “applied legal storytelling,” a branch of scholarship that intersects legal writing and clinical education. Professor Johansen has worked on two international conferences on the specialty topic and has helped build both new bridges with others in the legal academy and avenues of scholarly inquiry
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