Ben Bratman has taught legal skills courses at three different law schools, and in every year of his tenure at Pitt Law, he has taught the required first-year legal writing course, Legal Analysis & Writing. Professor Bratman has published several articles and spoken at legal writing conferences about his teaching methods and course exercises, and many of those exercises are in use throughout the country, having been adopted by professors at other law schools. Professor Bratman also teaches Legislation & Regulation to first-year students, and courses within the field of employment law—most recently Employment Discrimination—to upper-year students. He also serves as faculty advisor to the student moot court board.

After graduating cum laude from Vanderbilt Law School, Bratman served as law clerk to The Honorable Joel M. Feldman, United States Magistrate Judge, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, and practiced law in Atlanta with the firm of Pursley, Howell, Lowery & Meeks. Professor Bratman began his law-teaching career in 1999 at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. He joined the faculty at Pitt Law in 2002. In 2011 – 2012 he served as Visiting Professor of Lawyering Skills at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law.

Professor Bratman established a bar exam preparation program at Pitt Law and in 2005 was among the first in the country to create and teach a for-credit bar exam preparation course. He also lectures for Kaplan’s Bar Review Course for the Pennsylvania Bar Exam.

Education

• Analytical Writing

Specialization

• Legal Writing
• Bar Examinations
• Employment Law and Employment Discrimination
• Legislation and Regulation

Selected Publications

• Legal Research and Writing as a Proxy: Using Traditional Assignments to Achieve a More Fundamental Form of Practice Readiness, The Second Draft 7 (Spring 2011).
• Rand Paul and the Business of Discrimination, Jurist (May 28, 2010).
• A Defense of Sotomayor's "Wise Latina" Remark - with No Rewording Required, FindLaw (July 19, 2009).
• Toward a Deeper Understanding of Professionalism: Learning to Write and Writing to Learn during the First Two Weeks of Law School, 32 J. Legal Prof. 115 (2008).
• For-Credit Bar Exam Preparation: A Legal Writing Model, The Bar Examiner 26 (Nov. 2007). Also available on SSRN.
• Legal Knowledge: What’s Relevant, What’s Not? Why the Pennsylvania Bar Exam Should Focus on Federal Law, “Fundamental Legal Principles” and Legal Analysis—and Why It Should Stop Testing on Pennsylvania Law , The Pennsylvania Lawyer 24 (March/April 2005).
• “Reality Legal Writing”: Using a Client Interview for Establishing the Facts in a Memo Assignment, 12 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 87 (2004).
• Why I Teach , The Law Teacher 12 (Fall 2003).
• Brandeis & Warren’s The Right to Privacy and the Birth of the Right to Privacy, 69 Tenn. L. Rev. 623 (2002).

Presentations

• "Typographical Errors and the Law: From the Amusing to the Consequential," Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State Univ., (Mar. 2012). 

SSRN Author Page

Selected Professional Activities

• American Inns of Court (W. Edward Sell Chapter).
• Guest Lecturer on Bar Exam Preparation, Indiana Council on Legal Education Opportunity, Indianapolis, IN, (July 2012).
• Visiting Professor of Lawyering Skills, Univ. of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, Sacramento, CA, (2011 – 2012).
• Lecturer, Kaplan/PMBR’s Pennsylvania General Bar Review Course.