Sara Wolff

Professor of Law

Education

A.B., cum laude, Princeton University
J.D., University of Virginia School of Law

Current Courses

  • Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication I
  • Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication II
  • Legal Writing TA
  • Topics Course: Changing Laws
  • Independent Writing Project/Upper Level Writing
  • Independent Study
  • Pre-Law Undergraduate Scholars Program

Research Interests

  • Legal Citation
  • Legal Research & Writing

Professor Wolff joined Maine Law as a full-time faculty member in fall 2014. She teaches Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication I and II in the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program. She is also on the faculty of the PreLaw Undergraduate Scholars (PLUS) Program, and also chairs the Admissions and Awards Committees.

In September 2018, Professor Wolff was promoted early to professor of legal writing. She was awarded the University of Southern Maine’s 2018-2019 Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching. She speaks frequently on topics related to legal writing at local, regional, and national conferences. Her research interests focus primarily on the pedagogy of legal writing and on legal citation.

Professor Wolff brings twenty years of varied legal writing and research experience to the classroom. As a student at the University of Virginia School of Law, she was a Dillard Fellow/teaching assistant for two years in the law school’s first-year legal research and writing program and was an articles editor on the Virginia Environmental Law Journal. Following law school, she clerked for a United States Magistrate Judge in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. She then entered private practice in the employee benefits group of Venable LLP in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. In addition to drafting traditional research memos, Professor Wolff’s practice involved drafting a variety of client communications, employee benefit and welfare plan documents, government submissions, and summary plan descriptions directed to plan participants.

Professor Wolff subsequently joined the United States Treasury Department in Washington, working as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Chief Counsel to the Internal Revenue Service where she worked on legal matters with the Treasury Department, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and advisors to Congress. There she drafted diverse forms of legal writing including Treasury regulations, revenue rulings, private letter rulings, revenue procedures, notices, pretrial motions, and position papers for appellate briefs, opinion letters, and speeches.

After moving with her family to Maine in 2006, Professor Wolff worked for the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Prior to joining Maine Law as a full-time faculty member, she was an adjunct professor at the Law School, first teaching Advanced Legal Writing and then Legal Writing II.

Selected Publications

Uniform Maine Citations (2022-2024) (with Leadbetter and Seitzinger) . [Maine Law]

“Pro Bono Services in Maine,” 35 ME. BAR J. 106 (2020) (Co-authored with Juliet Holmes-Smith)

Uniform Maine Citations (2020-2021 ed. 2020) (with Leadbetter and Seitzinger). [Maine Law]

Uniform Maine Citations (2019-2020 ed. 2019) (with Leadbetter and Seitzinger).

 

Education

A.B., cum laude, Princeton University
J.D., University of Virginia School of Law

Current Courses

  • Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication I
  • Legal Research, Analysis, and Communication II
  • Legal Writing TA
  • Topics Course: Changing Laws
  • Independent Writing Project/Upper Level Writing
  • Independent Study
  • Pre-Law Undergraduate Scholars Program

Research Interests

  • Legal Citation
  • Legal Research & Writing