Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Footnotes As Product Differentiation, Arthur D. Austin

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Professor Fred Rodell announced his first Goodbye to Law Reviews in 1936, he established the accepted wisdom for law review criticism. Rodell complained that law review literature had two serious defects-style and content. Subsequent criticism has been persistently harsh; the common theme is that "[the extraordinary proliferation of law reviews, most of them student edited and all but a handful very erratic in quality, has been harmful for the nature, evaluation, and accessibility of legal scholarship."

Having exhausted complaints on substance, critics uncovered another mischievous threat. They discovered that articles are Typhoid Marys of an insidious plague-footnotes. Second-rate style …

Thinking (By Writing) About Legal Writing, Philip C. Kissam

Vanderbilt Law Review

The practice of law requires a good amount of original writing,and it is a commonplace today that much of this writing is done rather poorly. Charles Fried, the United States Solicitor General,has implied that much legal writing, especially in appellate briefs,is "turgid and boring."' John Nowak, a Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, has reiterated Fred Rodell's classic complaint that the writing in law reviews lacks both style and substance. More fundamentally, Steven Stark, in his Harvard Law Review comment, has argued that the style and substance of most legal writing are flawed by lawyers' ideological commitments to …