Senior Lecturing Fellow
Joan Ames Magat, a Senior Lecturing Fellow, serves as General Editor for Duke Law School ’s journal of Law & Contemporary Problems and as an advisory editor to Duke Law authors of academic articles, and she teaches an Advanced Legal Writing workshop for second- and third-year law students.
Magat graduated from Scripps College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Northwestern University. She taught literature and composition at a number of colleges in North Carolina and at the University of Rhode Island before turning to law as her second career. She earned her J.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1982, then worked as a legal editor on Arthur Larson’s workers’ compensation and employment discrimination treatises. The bulk of her subsequent legal career was spent serving as a law clerk for several justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Subsequently, she researched and wrote for a small, civil law firm and for the N.C. Institute of Government and, from 2000-2005, taught Legal Analysis, Research and Writing at Duke Law School.