BLS Library Blog

Last year, the Brooklyn Law Library added to its collection The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well (3d ed.) by Tom Goldstein and Jethro K. Lieberman (Call No. KF250. G65 2016). This critically acclaimed book “should be in the office of every lawyer” says William Safire of the New York Times. In its 286 pages, the authors demystify legal writing, outline the causes and consequences of poor writing, and prescribe easy-to-apply remedies to improve it. Reflecting changes in law practice over the past decade, this revised edition includes new sections around communicating digitally, getting to the point, and writing persuasively. It also provides an editing checklist, editing exercises with a suggested revision key, usage notes that address common errors, and reference works to further aid your writing. This guide is an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and law students.

Chapters are: Why Lawyers Write Poorly — Does bad writing really matter? — Don’t make it like it was — The Practice of Writing — Ten steps to writing it down — Of dawdlers and scrawlers, pacers and plungers: getting started and overcoming blocks — The technology of getting it down: from quill pens to computers — Lawyers as publishers: words are your product — Getting to the Point — Writing persuasively for your audience: tell your audience the point — Writing the lead — Revising for Clarity and Luster — Form, structure, and organization — Wrong words, long sentences, and other mister meaners — Revising your prose — Making your writing memorable.

Books and essays about the art of writing well go back a long time. In 1947, English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair 1903 – 1950) and author of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story and Nineteen Eighty-Four, his most famous works, wrote an essay titled Politics and the English Language. Although the essay addresses the decline of language in political and economic contexts, Orwell, in the closing paragraphs, offers rules that cover effective legal writing as well. They are:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

BrooklynWorks is the online repository of Brooklyn Law School, providing open access to scholarship produced by the law school and to other collections of law school materials. The repository is a service of the Brooklyn Law School Library. Current collections focus on faculty scholarship, the law school’s journals and library special collections.

Within the law Journals collection, you can browse or search issues of the Brooklyn Law Review, the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, the Journal of Law & Policy, and the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, & Commercial Law.  Within the faculty scholarship collection, you can browse or search Brooklyn Law School’s faculty publications going back to 2010.

Within the Special Collections, you can browse the papers of David Trager from the 1986-1989 New York City Charter Revision Commissions.  Included in this historic collection are various drafts of the New York City Charter, meeting minutes and letters to the members of the commission.  The digitized documents were selected from materials he donated to the Brooklyn Law School Archives. To access the entire collection, you can contact the reference desk (refdesk@brooklaw.edu) and make an appointment to visit the archives.

Are you struggling with selecting a topic for your seminar paper or suffering from writers’ block? Help is on the way. At 4:00 pm on Thursday, February 4, Prof. Fajans and Librarian Kathy Darvil will run their semi-annual workshop on how to research and write a seminar paper. The workshop will take a little over an hour and will be held in Room 400. Topics covered include sources for selecting your topic, sources for researching your topic, and how to effectively organize and write your paper. If you are unable to attend the workshop, you can access an online research guide which contains a recording of the workshop, links to and descriptions of all the research sources discussed, and the writing and research presentations. The online guide is available at guides.brooklaw.edu/seminarpaper. From the guide’s landing page, you will be able to access a recording of this year’s presentation, Professor Fajans’ slideshow on how to write your seminar paper, and Kathy Darvil’s online presentation on how to research your seminar paper. If you should need further help selecting or researching your topic, please stop by the reference desk for assistance.

Law students often write lengthy papers and exams answers believing more is better. But readers, including both law professors and judges, take brevity seriously. See for example the case of Mylward v. Weldon, 21 ER 136 (1596), where the Chancery Court of England punished an aspiring lawyer and ordered that a pleading 120 pages long be removed from the file because it was about eight times longer than it needed. He ordered the pleader be taken to the Fleet prison and that on the next Saturday the Warden of the Fleet bring the pleader into Westminster Hall at 10 a.m. and then and there cut a hole in the midst of the pleading and place it over the pleader’s head so that it would hang over his shoulders with the written side outwards. The Warden had to lead the pleader around Westminster Hall while the three courts were sitting and display him “bare headed and bare faced” and then be returned to the Fleet prison until he had paid a £10 fine – a huge sum in those days. 

The complete text is available in a facsimile at this link. This tale of the bareheaded lawyer gives legal writers a vivid image of what not to do. The Second Circuit, citing the case in Varda, Inc. v. Insurance Co. of North America, 45 F.3d 634 (2d Cir. 1995), stated that the plaintiff’s brief “stirs nostalgia for the rigors of the common law.”

The Brooklyn Law School Library has in its reserve collection Thinking Like A Writer: A Lawyer’s Guide To Effective Writing And Editing by Stephen V. Armstrong and Timothy P. Terrell (Call #KF250 .A76 2009) which consists of six parts including Chapter 10 – Words: Precision and Brevity. The book has exercises, examples, and writing do’s and don’ts, and gives step-by-step instruction on the specialized techniques to draft clear and persuasive legal documents.

Congratulations to Michael A. Sabino, Brooklyn Law School Class of 2012, for winning the Winter 2011 Student Legal Writing Contest sponsored by the National Law Review for his article Football and Antitrust Law: American Needle v. NFL and Its Meaning for Combinations in Restraint of Trade and the Rule of Reason in the 21st Century. Michael is an intern for the Hon. Leonard Wexler, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York. He served as an intern with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Organized Crime Strike Force; Hon. Leonard B. Austin, Appellate Division, Second Department, New York State Courts; District Attorneys of New York, Queens, and Nassau Counties. Michale has also published other articles this year. See From Chiarella to Cuban: The Continuing Evolution of The Law of Insider Trading, 16 Fordham J. Corp. & Fin. L. 101 (March 2011) and Shale-Gas Case Ringing Alarms in State-Level Mineral-Rights Law, 28 Natural Gas & Electricity 5 (December 2011).

Those students participating in this years writing competition and others, who wish to improve their legal writing, may want to
check out a recent post from the Blog of the Legal Times. The post highlights interviews of the United States Supreme Court Justices on effective persuasive writing. The interviews were conducted by Bryan Garner, a noted legal writing and style expert. The transcripts of the interviews are published online and available for free download at The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing. Some notable quotes from the transcripts include: