Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner gave an interview recently to the ABA Journal in which they discuss their new book, “Persuading Judges,” and advocacy, both written and oral. You can view the full transcript of the interview on the ABA Journal’s website via this link. Regardless of whether you agree with Justice Scalia’s judicial philosophy or not, he is perhaps one of the finest legal writers of this generation, or any other, and his thoughts on effective advocacy are compelling. I highly recommend that you read both the ABA Journal interview and “Persuading Judges.”
Filed under: Legal Writing
Ilya Somin has a post up at the Volokh Conspiracy on an issue that, although esoteric, is near and dear to my heart. The Bluebook is an over sized, ridiculously opaque and complicated manual that governs the form of citations to source materials in scholarly work in almost all publications, as well as briefs and other documents filed in most courts. I have long believed, beginning during my tenure as a managing editor of my law school’s law review, that the Bluebook rules are needlessly complicated and enormously wasteful. If the purpose of citation is to enable a reader to easily locate source material, it is almost certainly true that the cumbersome Bluebook rules are not really necessary. Certainly for practicing lawyers and judges Bluebook rules and format are little help, and not much more than a source of frustration or amusement, mostly honored in the breach. I applaud Professor Somin for his stand against the Bluebook. Abolish it, I say.
(Hat tip: Feddie at Southern Appeal)
Filed under: Legal Writing , Bluebook, citation, Legal Writing
January 18, 2008 • 10:29 am
In a recent opinion, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, who some describe as perhaps the greatest living appellate judge (a claim with which I would not necessarily disagree), offered some useful advice on the subject of brief writing. Specifically, he addressed the dense legalese that littered the briefs that had been submitted in a complex reinsurance case, and offered some advice that all attorneys ought to take to take to heart:
A note, finally, on advocacy in this court. The lawyers’ oral arguments were excellent. But their briefs, although well written and professionally competent, were difficult for us judges to understand because of the density of the reinsurance jargon in them. There is nothing wrong with a specialized vocabulary—for use by specialists. Federal district and circuit judges, however, with the partial exception of the judges of the court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (which is semi-specialized), are generalists. We hear very few cases involving reinsurance, and cannot possibly achieve expertise in reinsurance practices except by the happenstance of having practiced in that area before becoming a judge, as none of us has. Lawyers should understand the judges’ limited knowledge of specialized fields and choose their vocabulary accordingly. Every esoteric term used by the reinsurance industry has a counterpart in ordinary English, as we hope this opinion has demonstrated. The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves.
(Hat tip to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog)
Filed under: Legal Writing
