Teresa Godwin Phelps

Professor Teresa Godwin Phelps directed the Legal Rhetoric Program and taught Legal Rhetoric at American University’s Washington College of Law from 2006 until 2019. From 1980 until 2006, she was a Professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School where she directed the legal writing program. At Notre Dame she was a Fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She holds three degrees from Notre Dame, including a Ph.D. in English, and one degree from Yale Law School. She has published widely in the legal rhetoric field, including a seminal article, “The New Legal Rhetoric” in 1986 that helped to establish a new legal writing pedagogy. She was a founding member of the Legal Writing Institute and served on its Board of Directors, and she was a member of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Her other teaching and academic interests have included law and literature, international truth commissions, women and the law, and human rights, and she has published over thirty articles and three books, including Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, paper 2006). She has lectured internationally on women’s rights and on truth commission reports. She often gave presentations and seminars on improving legal writing to other legal writing teachers, practicing attorneys, and judges. In addition, in 1995 she published a memoir, The Coach’s Wife (Norton).

Professor Phelps won a Lilly Foundation Grant in 1988, and in 1999 won the Grenville Clark Award, which honors members of the University of Notre Dame community whose voluntary activities and public service advance the cause of peace and human rights. She was awarded the Legal Writing Institute’s Courage Award for 2011.

In 2016, the Legal Writing Institute established the Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication. The annual awards recognizes outstanding scholarship within the legal writing discipline. One or more awards will be given each year for scholarly articles, essays, or books. In establishing the award, the Legal Writing Institute stated, “Naming these awards in your honor recognizes your exemplary scholarship, your consistent encouragement of others’ scholarly work, and the foundational article that has nourished and influenced all subsequent study of the field, “The New Legal Rhetoric”.

In 2019 Professor Phelps retired from Washington College of Law and is now Professor Emerita. She has been a member of the board of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and is currently a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children who have been neglected or abused.