Articles Tagged with Legal writing

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“The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School is hosting this Virtual Symposium on Citation and the Law – April 22 and 23, 2021.

This FREE symposium will highlight the scholarship of law librarians and faculty interested in issues ranging from the US News and World Reports rankings for scholarly productivity, to link rot, to empirical research in the use of citations, and more. Keynote speaker Fred Shapiro will set the stage with his paper “The Most-Cited Legal Scholars Revisited” to be published in the University of Chicago Law Review. All the papers will be published in a book by the Hein Company….”

Link to the schedule and registration page from Symposium on Citation and the Law.

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You may or may not use a serial comma wherever (or nowhere) else you want, but woe to the person who leaves the serial comma out of legal documents, including contracts, legal opinions, statutes, regulations, and any other legal agreement or law that will be interpreted literally (and I mean literally, literally) by parties to the agreement or by a judge – or even, mercy, by a legislator or government lawyer.

Honestly now: Do you really want to pay lawyer(s!) bills and court costs when lawyers, judges, and clients end up doing battle over the meaning of a sentence when the presence of a comma would have allowed everyone to go home to supper and a peaceful night’s sleep?

Lawyers, legislators, drafters of laws, and judges have enough trouble writing clearly without adding to their own and their readers’ woes. Use the serial comma, please. It will save all of us time and money.

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“The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World,” April 28, 2015 by Jennifer Davis (Law Library of Congress)

“…. The centrality of interpretation to law and poetry is also explored by Wallace Stevens, most markedly in his poem “Metaphors of a Magnifico“:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

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At the end of the April 2015 “The Legal Writer” column in the OSB Bulletin, Suzanne Rowe poses a Brevity Challenge:

“How much can you say in just a few words? Here’s the Brevity Challenge: In just six words, write your best demand letter, contract, will, case brief, statement of facts, argument, conclusion or anything else that lawyers write. Send me your prose, along with your name and where you live. The best will appear in a future column of The Legal Writer.”

(The article does not provide an email address for the author. You can send it via her University of Oregon Law School website or to the OSB Bulletin Editor.)

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“He’s not much of a legal mind, but boy can he proofread….”

It’s that time again to visit the bitter, twisted, and hilarious Justice Bedsworth: “March 2015 – In Dog We Trust,” by Justice William W. Bedsworth. (You can read the Judge’s April 2015 “A Criminal Waste of Space” column, too.)

And if you want to see the yes, it’s a true story, rug, just search Google Image for these words: pinellas county sheriff’s office rug in dog we trust

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“He said, she said,” by Ian Pisarcik, Legal Publications Attorney Editor

Excerpt: “One of my favorite cartoons depicts a young female student standing next to a tall male teacher. Both are staring at a chalkboard. The chalkboard reads: Stone Age Man, Bronze Age Man, and Iron Age Man. The speech bubble extending from the young girls mouth asks: “Did they have women in those days?”

“Gender-neutral language is achieved by avoiding the use of ‘gendered generics‘ (male or female nouns and pronouns used to refer to both men and women).” This is easier said than done. But so is carrying a tune, and that doesn’t stop nine out of ten I-5 drivers from pulling their lips back and pretending they’re Mick Jagger….” [Link to full OSB Legal Pubs He said/She said blog post.]

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An interesting book review by Richard A. Posner (Judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) of:

“Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner
(Thomson/West, 567 pp., $49.95)

Excerpt: “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia, by Richard Posner, by Richard A. Posner, August 24, 2012, The New Republic:

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Writing and reading for pleasure: I’ve been reading Edward Tufte’s “Beautiful Evidence” and it reminded me of this other masterpiece:

Leff, Arthur:

“And, of course, for all that, legal scholarship is also something that produces pleasure. I do not want to end this symposium on a note of pure Yellow-Book aestheticism, but I defy any of the symposiasts (and at least many of the readers) to deny that they’re also in the game (as, I suspect, were Adam Smith and Karl Marx) for those occasional moments when they say, in some concise and illuminating way, something that appears to be true.

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