Category: Legal Writing

 Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. Advocates can excel at this, both public and private; often not to the benefit of the positions they advocate. A notifying party once wanted to define the relevant product market on one of my cases as “leisure time activities”.  It would have included everything from taking a nap, walking the dog, grabbing a beer, or watching television. Among other things. Unsurprisingly the […]

“There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” This quote and the law review article it comes from (entitled “Goodbye to Law Reviews“) is new to me. I came across it via Edward Tufte whose superb books and website are also, for different reasons, well worth a read. Most – all? – of these brilliant criticisms from 1936 remain true today. Though I don’t think the problem is, as the New York Times argues, that US law reviews are student run, and I think the article misses a criticism that many scholarly law articles are simply too long and, in an attempt to be comprehensive, stray too far from the core […]