And those who
care about legal writing should continue to insist that the course and those who teach it receive appropriate respect.
Posts about legal writing and litigation strategies, news about legal conferences and the occasional academic job announcement.
So with all these
tips about legal writing, one of the best tips is that sometimes writing isn't the best mode of communication.
Whether its wise or not depends on the case - because the procedural stuff can be heavy weather and lack of
knowledge about legal writing and law can be a real detriment.
You'll also receive a complimentary subscription to The Source, a monthly e-mail
newsletter about legal writing and outsourcing for solo and small firm lawyers.
Editor's Note I am delighted to welcome you to the nineteenth volume of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, the nation's premier
journal about legal writing and communication and the official journal of the Legal Writing Institute.
These contributions may take any form, such as promoting the use of clear language in public documents, improving the quality of legal writing instruction, advocating for better writing within the legal community, outstanding scholarship or
journalism about legal writing or legal topics, or exceptional writing in law practice.
Through The Scout Report, I recently learned of the Web site of the Legal Writing Institute, an organization that serves as a forum for discussion and
scholarship about legal writing, analysis and research.
So those of us who care
about legal writing naturally took notice when the second edition of The Solicitor General's Style Guide: Second Edition dropped on October 3, 2015 and became Amazon's # 1 new release in legal writing.
Descriptions of legal writing programs, suggestions for more effective instruction, and critical evaluation of how legal writing was and should be taught dominated our field.5 These early works were essential to opening a
discourse about legal writing.
But, ever since legal writing expert Bryan Garner began urging lawyers to write in clear, direct prose — and, in doing so, to essentially discard much of what they learned in law
school about legal writing — there has been a growing movement toward the use of the narrative style in legal writing.
In sum, this Volume provides us with a diverse and engaging range of articles that challenge us to examine our teaching, our theory, and our
assumptions about legal writing pedagogy and legal education.
To further that goal, the Institute publishes Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, a peer - edited Journal that provides a forum for an exchange of scholarly ideas and
opinions about legal writing.
It is rare to hear
about legal writing sections with 100 or more students; instead, most professors teach about 42 students each semester.3 One nineteen - year veteran recently described her own professional metamorphosis as follows:
The best
thing about Legal Writing class as a 1L for me is that it's teaching me a lot about a few small segments of the law.
Here's what people
say about the Legal Writing Pro line - up: «empowering,» «practical,» «engaging,» «immediately applicable,» «extremely helpful,» «compelling,» «simply outstanding,» «fresh, timely,» «fun,» «fabulous,» «sophisticated.»
The book is
also about legal writing (letters, memos, publications for external audiences) as opposed to legal drafting (contracts, factums, opinions), although there are some drafting points here and there (and, when I look at the table of contents, rather more of them than I had thought).
Since I started
writing about legal writing, I've been amazed at how entrenched so many lawyers seem to be against the notion that legal writing should be as easy to understand as possible to the widest audience possible.
I am delighted to welcome you to the nineteenth volume of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, the nation's premier
journal about legal writing and communication and the official journal of the Legal Writing Institute.
After a thorough introduction to the matter of expertise and its acquisition, they discuss the results of a project in which fifteen senior Canadian lawyers (in three focus groups)
talked about the legal writing of junior lawyers.
Together with Bryan A. Garner, Scalia is the author of two
books about legal writing, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, and Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.
The contribution may take any form, such as promoting the use of clear language in public documents; engaging in outstanding scholarship or
journalism about legal writing or in exceptional writing for law practice; improving the quality of legal writing instruction; or advocating for better writing within the legal community.
And it was only a matter of time before people who
care about legal writing would find an excuse to bicker over something in the guide on Twitter.
But like so much of what's been written
about legal writing, the blog thus far engages more in telling about good legal writing, rather than showing how it's done (for the importance of show rather than tell, see, e.g., here or here).
1 See J. Christopher Rideout, Research and Writing
about Legal Writing: A Foreword from the Editor, 1 Leg.
Editor's Note I am delighted to welcome you to the eighteenth Volume of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, the nation's premier journal
about legal writing and communication and the official journal of the Legal Writing Institute.