In response to an editorial written by some first-year law students here, I wrote the following explanation.

It is true that the University of Texas School of Law has a first-year legal-writing curriculum without brief writing. When the law school administration removed credits from the required course five years ago, brief writing was lost. Needless to say, the legal-writing faculty thought it was a mistake. So we’ve been teaching a brief-writing elective that only some 1Ls can get into. We're optimistic that brief writing will return to the required first-year curriculum. Indeed, a proposal to do that comes before the faculty this week.

Here's some other information I did not provide. Because of the changed work load that resulted when the administration removed credits from the required first-year course, we all began teaching upper-division writing courses in addition to the first-year brief-writing elective. We now teach 15-18 upper-division courses during fall and spring and 4 more during summer. Students love them; they are always over-subscribed.

Here's a list:

Advanced Legal Writing
Advanced Legal Writing: Transactional Drafting
Advanced Legal Writing with Texas Research
Advanced Legal Writing: for TAs in the Writing Program
Writing for Litigation
Judicial Clerkship Writing: Trial Level

We're doing our best to keep those courses in place even after brief writing comes back into the required first-year curriculum.