"Legal writing is a mess", says the author, and quotes from the leaders of the plain language for lawyers movement. From her "Funeral for Legalese" through her "Editing Checklist", Carol Ann Wilson convinces her readers that lawyers should rid their writing of legalese and that lawyers' assistants can help. "The LA who can draft pleadings is valuable to the lawyer and to the legal profession". And those pleadings should be "concise, powerful, and communicative".
“This easy-to-follow guide is useful both as a general course of instruction and as a targeted aid in solving particular legal writing problems.” —Harvard Law Review Clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful—all too often, legal writing embodies none of these qualities. Its reputation for obscurity and needless legalese is widespread. For more than twenty years, Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English has helped address this problem by providing lawyers, judges, paralegals, law students, and legal scholars with sound advice and practical tools for improving their written work. The leading guide to clear writing in the field, this indispensable volume encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process that will appeal to other professionals: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills. Accessible and witty, Legal Writing in Plain English draws on real-life writing samples that Garner has gathered through decades of teaching. Trenchant advice covers all types of legal materials, from analytical and persuasive writing to legal drafting, and the book’s principles are reinforced by sets of basic, intermediate, and advanced exercises in each section. In this new edition, Garner preserves the successful structure of the original while adjusting the content to make it even more classroom-friendly. He includes case examples from the past decade and addresses the widespread use of legal documents in electronic formats. His book remains the standard guide for producing the jargon-free language that clients demand and courts reward. “Those who are willing to approach the book systematically and to complete the exercises will see dramatic improvements in their writing.” —Law Library Journal
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.
In this groundbreaking book, Scalia and Garner systematically explain all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation in an engaging and informative style with hundreds of illustrations from actual cases. Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a corporation entitled to personal privacy? If you trade a gun for drugs, are you using a gun in a drug transaction? The authors grapple with these and dozens of equally curious questions while explaining the most principled, lucid, and reliable techniques for deriving meaning from authoritative texts. Meanwhile, the book takes up some of the most controversial issues in modern jurisprudence. What, exactly, is textualism? Why is strict construction a bad thing? What is the true doctrine of originalism? And which is more important: the spirit of the law, or the letter? The authors write with a well-argued point of view that is definitive yet nuanced, straightforward yet sophisticated.
This book tells what the language of the law is, how it got that way and how it works out in the practice. The emphasis is more historical than philosophical, more practical than pedantic.
In Point Made, Ross Guberman uses the work of great advocates as the basis of a valuable, step-by-step brief-writing and motion-writing strategy for practitioners. The author takes an empirical approach, drawing heavily on the writings of the nation's 50 most influential lawyers.
This history of legal language slices through the polysyllabic thicket of legalese. The text shows to what extent legalese is simply a product of its past and demonstrates that arcane vocabulary is not an inevitable feature of our legal system.
A complete guide to clean, precise and understandable legal writing So many books give you advice that turns out to be hollow: "know your audience," "structure your writing." The real strength in Plain Language Legal Writing is how, throughout, Stephens provides clear instructions on how to accomplish what she's recommending. Instead of just telling you to plan what you're going to write, she walks you step-by-step through the planning. Instead of telling you to consider your audience before writing, she describes in detail the sorts of audiences a legal document might have (more than you'd expect!) and how to best meet their needs. Plain Language Legal Writing will help you produce documents that people are willing to read and able to understand. More: PlainLanguageLegalWriting.comOther versions: e-book
Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.
