Comparative Legal Traditions: Upper-Level Writing Tips

Designed to help law students write and publish articles, this text provides detailed instructions for every aspect of the law school writing, research, and publication process. Topics covered include law review articles and student notes, seminar term papers, how to shift from research to writing, cite-checking others' work, publishing, and publicizing written works. With supporting documents available on http://volokh.com/writing, the book helps law students and everyone else involved in academic legal writing: professors save time and effort communicating basic points to students; law schools satisfy the American Bar Association's second- and third-year writing requirements; and law reviews receive better notes from their staff. The Fifth Edition, based on the author's experience teaching his newly designed Intensive Editing Workshop and First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, adds material on editing, rebutting counterarguments, writing strategy, identifying and using the key assets of the article, fighting "the curse of knowledge," and submitting articles to law reviews. It also adds extra examples of sound writing, as well as editing exercises.

This book...[teaches] law students how to write scholarly papers for seminars, law reviews, and law-review competitions and how to have their work recognized. It helps novices and more experienced scholars alike to write papers with a minimum of anxiety and a maximum of creativity. Employing a process theory of writing, the text first describes the enterprise of scholarly writing and then discusses techniques for brainstorming topics and theses, researching, drafting, and revising for substance and style. It covers both traditional doctrinal topics and newer areas like empirical studies. There are also chapters on footnotes, avoiding plagiarism, law review practice, and dissemination of student work through publication and submission to national writing competitions. Appendices provide a sample law-review competition paper, answers to in-text exercises, sample syllabi for scholarly writing courses, and a rubric for evaluating and editing scholarly papers and articles.

Since first appearing in 2002, Bryan Garner's The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style has established itself as the go-to source for all questions of legal style (apart from citation form). The book isn't just one talented man's effort: Garner has two experienced coauthors plus a hands-on team of 54 editorial advisers, most of whom have long and valuable experience teaching LRW. The book is a one-of-a-kind resource--the legal writer's equivalent of The AP Stylebook or The Chicago Manual of Style. The brand-new fourth edition has lots of new material, including an especially helpful new chapter on handling quotations. The two exhaustive indexes (word and subject), plus the detailed table of contents, make it easy to find authoritative guidance within seconds, whatever the question might be.

Since the first edition was published in 1991, The Elements of Legal Style has established itself as the authoritative guide on all the major issues of writing style in law. Now its coverage has been expanded in this new edition, which features additional sections, many more examples, and a thoroughly researched appendix that contains 80 major statements on prose style what it is and how to attain it. Inspired by Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, this book clearly (often wittily) explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow.

Originally released to great acclaim in 2010, Typography for Lawyers was the first guide to the essentials of typography aimed specifically at lawyers. Author Matthew Butterick, an attorney and Harvard-trained typographer, dispelled the myth that legal documents are incompatible with excellent typography. Butterick explains how to get professional results with the tools you already have quickly and easily.

From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment. So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the "air and light and time and space," in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection? Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure.