Professor Meredith Stange was recently elected to a three-year term on the national Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) Board of Directors. Founded in 1996, ALWD is one of the most prestigious and influential professional legal writing organizations with more than 300 members representing more than 150 law schools throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Professor Stange has been an active member of the ALWD for seven years. She currently serves on the ALWD/LWI Survey Committee and the Online/Distance Learning Committee. She has also been a member of the Diversity Committee and a co-Chair of the Website Committee.
In November 2020, Professor Stange was selected to co-chair the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the Legal Writing Institute (LWI). The LWI is another national, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving legal communication by supporting the development of teaching and scholarly resources and establishing forums to discuss the study, teaching, and practice of professional legal writing. The Diversity and Inclusion committee fosters and supports diversity and inclusion in legal writing education by supporting legal writing faculty of color, LGBTQ legal writing faculty, legal writing faculty with disabilities, and the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives in the legal writing classroom.
Professor Stange is the director of the NIU Law Legal Writing Program. She teaches Legal Writing I and II, Legal Methods, Legal Analysis: Skills and Strategies, Writing for Practice, and Health Law. She is also a coordinator for the first-year Academic Success Program. Prior to coming to the NIU College of Law, Professor Stange was a litigation associate with Hinshaw & Culbertson in Rockford, Illinois, practicing in the area of medical malpractice and insurance defense. Her practice also included corporate health care issues, with an emphasis on the privacy regulations to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
