Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Foreword: Legal Essays: A Checklist, Reagan Seidler, Sarah Macleod

Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies

Good legal writing is more science than art. It persuades not by its rhetoric but by the impregnability of its research method. It answers its question using a testable, falsifiable, and repeatable method, so that others would choose to follow the same steps and come to the same conclusion.

At the Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies (DJLS), we read scores of papers each year from law schools across the country. They show us that, nationwide, many authors misunderstand the purpose of a research paper. It is not a memo, nor is it an op-ed. The goal is to use a …