Ralph L. Brill (December 19, 1935 – June 21, 2019) was Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Early life
Brill was born in Chicago, the son of Romanian immigrants. He attended the University of Illinois, where he received both his undergraduate degree and his Juris Doctor. While in law school, Brill served as associate editor of the University of Illinois Law Forum. He was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1960. Brill's first case as an attorney was a dog bite case.
Establishing a legal writing course
Brill began teaching law school in the fall of 1960 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He began his teaching career by teaching a subject outside the customary law school discipline — Legal Writing. Legal Writing was part of a course entitled "Problems and Research." It was at this time that Brill began to recognize the importance of including skills courses in the law school curriculum. Brill also became aware early on that "skills" teachers, such as those who taught legal writing, were treated differently from "substantive" (non-skills) teachers who were considered part of the regular faculty. According to institutional protocol, non-skills, or "theoretical," professors were compensated at a higher rate and given more political power than were their peers teaching nontheoretical and pragmatically oriented courses.
Following his year in Ann Arbor, in 1961, Brill returned to his hometown when he was offered a position at Chicago-Kent College of Law which, in 1969, merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology. Brill taught Property, Agency, Legislation, Damages and several sections of legal writing. For much of his later career, he has taught Torts. Recently, he added a Famous Trials in History seminar.
Legal writing program at Chicago-Kent
In 1977, Brill was asked by administrators at Chicago-Kent to set up a larger scale legal writing program. At that time, legal writing was still not considered an important discipline in legal study. Aside from a few programs, such as Marjorie Rombauer's program at the University of Washington, most legal writing departments consisted of one director and a staff of part-time instructors. Even when instructors were employed full-time, their contracts were most often limited to one or two years. These instructors were not considered "real" law school professors. In some instances, Legal Writing courses were staffed with individuals who were not legal professionals. Many legal educational institutions at the time maintained that skills teaching was the province of law firms, and that the discipline of legal writing was little more than a remedial grammar course not appropriate, even if necessary, in a graduate school setting.
Recognizing that skills instruction went beyond a course in remedial grammar, Brill proposed a three-year legal writing program which would be taught by legal professionals, and would be of a uniform quality for all students. Brill further proposed that class sizes be reduced so that students would receive more individualized instruction. The Chicago-Kent faculty adopted Brill's proposal and the legal writing program at Kent not only became the benchmark for all law school legal writing programs, but Chicago-Kent became known for the high level of legal training that its students received.
Brill remained director of Chicago-Kent's legal writing program for fourteen years. During that time period and afterward, he worked to improve the status of the legal writing professional. In 1985, Brill became one of the original Board members of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI), an association of legal writing professionals. Until the establishment of the LWI, legal writing professionals had few opportunities to exchange ideas or to compare experiences as to status at their schools. The LWI enabled them to band together in an attempt to enhance programs and status at their own schools.
While working toward national goals related to the profession of the legal writing professional, Brill continued to enhance the quality of his own program at Chicago-Kent. He helped to ensure that instructors in his own department, although not having the status of tenured faculty, were able to work without capped contracts. Moreover, Brill began, at the earliest stages of national computer use, to incorporate technology into his teaching by way of the use of listservs and visual presentations in class. In the early 1990s, Chicago-Kent became known for its use of technology in law school, and Brill was instrumental in establishing American Bar Association (ABA) accreditation standards related to distance learning in law schools.