The criminal justice doctoral faculty members need to evaluate your writing skills in the admissions process. Please know that this is an important component of the applicant review process, which must be undertaken without the aid or assistance of other persons. Accordingly, please submit a 5 – 10 page academic paper or excerpt from a longer document. The writing sample may be an excerpt from a master’s thesis, a paper submitted in a graduate program, or a law school course (preferably a 2L or 3L writing intensive course or a graduate law course such as an LL.M. program). Alternatively, submissions may be prepared contemporaneously with this application process.
If you are submitting a paper written in the past, it must be one that followed a standard academic or legal writing style such as APA, MLA, Harvard Style, the Chicago Manual, or in the case of a law school paper, The Bluebook (law review style is preferred over legal memoranda, but both substyles are acceptable). If you are writing your paper specifically for the purpose of this application, you are required to follow APA style. To ensure better reviews of your submission, avoid quoting others. Rather, you should evaluate information written by others, synthesize it, place it in your paper in your own words and express what it means to you, and provide the proper citations and references. Please take note that the faculty checks for originality and proper authorial attribution.