Professor Ben Bratman coordinates Pitt Law’s first-year legal writing program and teaches the required first-year courses Legal Analysis & Writing and Legislation & Regulation. Having studied and performed improvisational theater, he also specializes in teaching a broad set of communication and “human” skills to law students through a course that he created, entitled Applied Improv for Lawyers. In both the Applied Improv course and Legal Analysis & Writing, Bratman has pioneered the use of standardized patients from Pitt’s 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.
Bratman has published several articles and spoken at various conferences about his teaching methods and course exercises, and some of his exercises from Legal Analysis & Writing are in use throughout the country, having been adopted by professors at other law schools. He has also published articles and commentaries concerning bar exam reform, legal education, and the intersection between the two. For several years, he was a contributing writer for the Best Practices for Legal Education blog, hosted by Albany Law School.
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
- 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).
- Selected posts as contributor to the blog Best Practices for Legal Education:
- The Next Generation of the Bar Exam, NCBE Style, January 14, 2021
- Improv for First-Year Law Students?, June 5, 2019 (featured on TaxProf Blog, June 24, 2019)
- On the Value of Gap Years and Non-Legal Experience to Legal Employers (and Law Schools), Sept. 21, 2018
- More Thoughts on the Post-Millennial Generation of Students Arriving in Law School, Sept. 7, 2018
- Legislation & Regulation and the Bar Exam, Mar. 20, 2017
- The 25 Most Important Lawyering Skills?, Oct. 8, 2015
- 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.
- 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). 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
- 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
Applied Improvisation
Legal Writing
Legislation and Regulation
Employment Law and Employment Discrimination
