Professor Ben Bratman coordinates Pitt Law’s first-year legal writing program and teaches the required first-year course Legal Analysis & Writing. Having studied and performed improvisational theater, he also specializes in teaching a broad set of communication and related skills to law students in an interactive, improv-based course that he created, Human Skills for Lawyers. In both Human Skills and Legal Analysis & Writing, Bratman has pioneered the use of standardized patients from the School of Medicine to portray mock clients in classroom exercises designed to build students’ skills at client interaction and interviewing. Pitt Law’s Class of 2025 selected Bratman as the recipient of the Robert T. Harper Excellence in Teaching Award.
Over his years at Pitt Law, Bratman’s teaching and scholarship have covered a wide range of topics. He created and taught the school’s first for-credit bar exam preparation course for third-year students and has also taught Legislation & Regulation, Employment Discrimination, and Advanced Legal Writing. Bratman has published several articles and spoken at various conferences about teaching legal writing to first-year law students. He has also published articles and commentaries on bar exam reform, legal education, and their intersection. Most recently, Bratman has written and presented on the use of applied improvisation in legal education, and has led improv workshops for Pitt Law students and various outside groups.
Since 2020, Bratman has served as faculty advisor to the Pitt Legal Income Sharing Foundation (PLISF), and he was selected by Pitt Law students as the Distinguished Public Interest Professor for 2021. He has served previously as the faculty advisor to the student Moot Court Board and as the law school’s liaison to the Pennsylvania Board of Law Examiners. Before joining the Pitt Law faculty in 2002, Bratman clerked for a United States Magistrate Judge and practiced law in Atlanta, Georgia, and taught for three years at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. In 2011–2012, he served as Visiting Professor of Lawyering Skills at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law.
- JD, Vanderbilt University Law School
- BA, University of Washington
Education & Training
- Saying “Yes, And” to a Changing Legal Profession Through Improv, 3 J.L. Teaching & Learning 49 (2026).
- Another Important Victory for the Legal Profession—and Democracy, JURIST (July 3, 2025).
- Looking Back on a Bar Prep Writing Program, Raising the Bar (Fall 2024).
- The Annual List of Leg-Reg/Administrative Law Course Requirements, Yale Journal on Regulation (July 19, 2023).
- The Folly of the Embedded Full Citation: How the Bluebook and ALWD Manuals Encourage Weak Legal Writing, The Second Draft (April 2021).
- Improving the Performance of the Performance Test: The Key to Meaningful Bar Exam Reform, 83 UMKC L. Rev. 565 (2015). Available on SSRN.
- Legal Research and Writing as a Proxy: Using Traditional Assignments to Achieve a More Fundamental Form of Practice Readiness, The Second Draft, Spring 2011, at 7. Available here.
- Brandeis & Warren’s The Right to Privacy and the Birth of the Right to Privacy, 69 Tenn. L. Rev. 623 (2002). Also available on SSRN.
Presentations
- Using Embodied Pedagogy to Foster Learning, Resilience, and Sustainability in Law School and the Legal Profession, LIFT 2026: The Resilience Conference, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, May 22, 2026 (jointly with Olwyn Conway, American University, Washington College of Law; Camesha Little, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law; and Paul Marchegiani, UC Berkeley School of Law)
- Failure Is Always an Option: Building Resilience among Law Students through Improv, Building Resilience Case Studies on Student Interventions & Psychological Insights Conference, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, May 16, 2024 (jointly with Professor Olwyn Conway, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)
- Applied Improv, The Freeland Society, United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA, January 29, 2024.
- Applied Improv and the Law, Institute for Law Teaching and Learning annual conference, University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, June 2, 2023.
- In Defense of the Chalkboard as Effective Technology in the Legal Writing Classroom, Legal Writing Institute One-Day Workshop, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Nov 30, 2018
- Twenty-Five Skills that Legal Education Cannot Ignore (Even if Bar Examiners Will), Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference, University of New Mexico School of Law, March 2015.
Awards
- Robert T. Harper Excellence in Teaching Award, 2025
- Distinguished Public Interest Professor, 2021
Applied Improvisation
Legal Writing
Legislation and Regulation
Employment Law and Employment Discrimination
