Alexa Z. Chew

Alexa Z. Chew is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she teaches practical legal writing courses. She is an expert in legal citation (not to be confused with the Bluebook), and her citation scholarship includes “Citation Literacy,” “Stylish Legal Citation,” and “Citation Stickiness” (with Kevin Bennardo). With professor Katie Rose Guest Pryal, she is the co-editor of the Complete Series of legal textbooks, which includes The Complete Legal Writer (2d ed. 2020), The Complete Bar Writer (2020), and more forthcoming titles. She’s an active member of the two big professional organizations for legal writing—the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD)—and is a frequent presenter at legal writing conferences. You can also find her, and many other #legalwriting and #LRW experts, on Twitter, where she mostly tweets about legal writing at @aznchew. UNC Law has given her the Byrd Award for Excellence and Creativity in Teaching (2015) and the Charles E. Daye Award for Excellence in Faculty Service (2017). Before all that, she worked as a law clerk for the Honorable Rick Elmore of the North Carolina Court of Appeals and as a corporate associate at the late Bingham McCutchen LLP. She earned a J.D. from the Duke University School of Law and an A.B. from Princeton University, where she studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and wrote a senior thesis about her taphonomical analysis of a new dinosaur quarry in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Wyoming (i.e., how dinosaur bones got to where paleontologists found them). The thesis had many pictures in it.