INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL WRITING
Some legal writing texts start out by explaining how legal writing is different from other writing. But it should not be. While certain documents—complaints, briefs, deeds—may have a standard form, their content should be in plain English.
Most legal writing is atrocious. Fred Rodell, Dean of Yale Law School before most of us were born, had it right when he said, “There are two things wrong with most legal writing. One is style. The other is content.” This was in a fascinating article, Goodbye to Law Reviews,1 which should be assigned reading for all law students.
Where did we learn to write? Grammar school is certainly not that any more, but we learned rudimentary rules in grade school. Unfortunately, some of those “rules” were not rules at all. The grade-school teacher who told you not to start a sentence with and really mean not to write “I have a dog. And a cat. And a parakeet.” As we will discuss later, the use of “and” and “but” to begin a sentence is one mark of good writing.
Some of us honed our writing skills in high school and college. We learned from reading examples of good literature, and other writing, from journalistic to persuasive. Unless we fell victim to academic-jargon illiteracy (a subject for a separate treatise), we usually got better with practice. Though we may still have been handicapped by some false rules from grade school, some of us became at least passable writers before we entered law school. Then the roof fell in.
1 (1936), 23 Va.L.Rev. 38.
RESEARCHERS CLUB 