LawProse Lessons

Many legal writers are oblivious of an important secret of style: in wording a sentence, an emphatic word or phrase should fall at the end. Next time a piece of writing bores you, examine it closely. The writer is probably ending sentences with mundane information or arcana. That’s deathly. Consider two brief passages: ● Reynolds’s …

LawProse Lesson 349: A Key to Phrasing Sentences Read More »

My father dreams of “good grammar” once again being taught in schools. He thinks it to be part of the American dream: an aspiration available to everyone. But “good grammar” in the eyes of one person is, in the eyes of another, unacceptable intolerance toward linguistic variation. So a consensus in educational approach seems unlikely. …

LawProse Lesson 348: “Good Grammar”: My Father’s Dream Part II Read More »

My 90-year-old father, bless him, got upset yesterday upon reading a Washington Post piece saying that the Trump campaign is careening toward election day. He was incensed because he thought it should have said careering toward election day. Career, you see, has traditionally meant “to move wildly at full speed,” while careen has meant “to tip to one side while moving slowly.” He …

LawProse Lesson 347: My Father’s Dream Read More »

The modes of argument are as old as civilization: the ancient Greeks and Romans devised names for various rhetorical devices. Appeal to the pocketbook? The technical term is argumentum ad crumenam. Appeal to pity? It’s argumentum ad misericordiam. Use of rebuke or reproach? It’s epiplexis. A totally unsupported assertion? It’s an ipse dixit. The invocation of a looming catastrophe? …

LawProse Lesson #345: Presidential-Debate Bingo. Read More »

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was known for her clear, powerful prose. She learned how to write—how to write really well—from two undergraduate teachers at Cornell: Robert E. Cushman and Vladimir Nabokov. That’s right. In a 2006 interview with Bryan A. Garner, Justice Ginsburg explained that Nabokov “was a man in love with the sound of …

LawProse Lesson #344: Ginsburg on Good Writing. Read More »

Plain English is nobody’s mother tongue. You must work for it. You must learn to write “before” and “after” instead of the nearly ubiquitous “prior to” and “subsequent to.” In law, we’re besieged by bloated language. Unless you work tirelessly to simplify, you end up becoming just another purveyor of needless complexity and obfuscation. Take this 22-word …

LawProse Lesson #343: Nobody’s Mother Tongue. Read More »

I’m working on three big writing projects right now: a book on one aspect of 18th-century intellectual history; a biography of a mid-20th-century artist—a refugee from Hitler’s Germany; and a U.S. Supreme Court brief. Those are three very different genres, but the techniques are similar. You ask pertinent questions and embark on a quest for …

LawProse Lesson #342: The art of asking questions. Read More »

In April, the acclaimed legal historian Lawrence Friedman of Stanford Law School celebrated his 90th birthday. We applaud his many contributions to legal literature. In 1993, Friedman wrote an essay for the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, at the invitation of its founding editor, Bryan A. Garner. Here’s part of what Professor Friedman said then: Style …

LawProse Lesson #341: A Lesson from Professor Lawrence Friedman. Read More »

Writers are made, not born. Actually, they’re self-made. It’s always a conscious decision, and it takes conscious ongoing effort. Making yourself a good writer involves as much discipline as any other vocation or profession. And because discipline isn’t a trait that comes easily to most people, you’ll have a great advantage if you can develop …

LawProse Lesson #340: Discipline in writing. Read More »

Good writing is a marriage of good ideas with good expression. You must have both. The ideas need to be clear, and the language in which you express them must be clear. Clarity is the touchstone. A vague, fuzzy idea can at best be stated obliquely; any clear, solid idea can be expressed clearly. Unfortunately, …

LawProse Lesson #339: What is good writing? Read More »

At LawProse, we revise as much as the time will allow. For letters that may be three rounds; for briefs, ten rounds; for contracts, fifteen. For books, having more than a hundred revisions isn’t unusual. We like what Justice Louis Brandeis once said: There is no good writing—just good rewriting. The key to the writing …

LawProse Lesson #338: Revising your prose. Read More »

We recently saw a cartoon in which one character says to another, “I’m thinking of writing a book.” The other responds, “Can a boring person write an interesting book?” The answer is a resounding no. A boring person can’t write an interesting book. An unintelligent person can’t write an intelligent letter. A mean-spirited person can’t …

LawProse Lesson #337: You are what you write. Read More »

Why should it matter whether you say with regard to or *with regards to? (The asterisk indicates nonstandard English.) Anyway or *anyways? We have a way to go or *We have a ways to go? Couldn’t care less or *could care less? Regardless or *irregardless? Either way, everybody knows what you mean. It’s just that one expression typifies educated English, and the other typifies uneducated …

LawProse Lesson #336: The real reason for English usage. Read More »

            Lawyers are often called on to make arguments about the interpretation of legal texts. Too many go straight to probable intention, policy, and consequences—perhaps because legal education from 1950 to the present has emphasized those factors the most.             But since the late 1980s, textualism has been on the rise—perhaps primarily from the influence …

LawProse Lesson #335: Making a Textual Argument. Read More »

Law-school deans aren’t known to produce great scholarship. They’re too busy in meetings and writing fundraising letters all day. Most of them once produced scholarship, but it slows to a dribble once they assume a deanship.           The great exception here is Ward Farnsworth, dean of the University of Texas School of Law. He has …

LawProse Lesson #334: An important trilogy. Read More »

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer filing a brief or a college student turning in a paper: you must double-check your references. That means two things: (1) getting the names and the pages right, and (2) verifying all quotations word for word and letter for letter. If you’ve had to omit a word or …

LawProse Lesson #333: Double-check your references. Read More »

Golfers use a great expression to describe what happens when one player follows another player on the putting green—someone with a similar putt. The second player “goes to school” on the first—that is, learns about the speed and break of the putt. Going second lends an advantage.           At LawProse, perhaps because we’re erstwhile golfers, …

LawProse Lesson #332: Going to school. Read More »

Why every lawyer needs a home copy of The Law of Judicial Precedent. In the past month, three lawyers and one appellate judge have written to ask for citations to the ground-breaking treatise The Law of Judicial Precedent (2016). They were stuck at home and didn’t have a copy ready at hand. We supplied the …

LawProse Lesson #331: Why every lawyer needs a home copy of The Law of Judicial Precedent. Read More »

Why every litigator needs a home copy of Reading Law. Over the past five years, the U.S. Supreme Court has cited the Scalia & Garner treatise Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts in 32 cases. Since its publication in 2012, it has been cited in more than 1,200 appellate decisions—far more than any other …

LawProse Lesson #330: Why every litigator needs a home copy of Reading Law. Read More »