Law Commons^™

Judicial Rhetoric: Writing Persuasive Opinions, Gerald Lebovits

Arkansas Law Review

In 1947, Judge George Rose Smith denounced, in the Arkansas Law Review, the “dearth of material concerning the mechanics of writing a judicial opinion” as a “striking omission in legal literature.” He was right.

The lack of attention given to the judicial opinion-writing process back then was hard to justify. Judges spend much of their time writing decisions. Decisions are important. They determine rights and responsibilities, as well as resolve controversies. Scholars have written about every aspect of judging and legal issue—except one of the most important ones: how to decide a case and justify the decision. Judicial opinions set …

Promoting A Rhetoric Of Judicial Legitimacy In Pro Se Litigation, Alistair E. Newbern

Arkansas Law Review

In recent months, headline after headline has decried twin threats to the federal judiciary: declining public trust in the courts and escalating threats to judges’ personal safety. The public’s opinion of the Supreme Court reached “close to a three decade low” in 2025, while Americans’ confidence in the federal judiciary as a whole “dropped to a record-low 35% in 2024.”

In his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts identified a recent uptick in four areas of “illegitimate activity” that “threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends: (1) violence, (2) …

Iceberg Ethos: Credibility And Hemingway In Predictive Legal Writing, Brad Desnoyer

Faculty Works

In predictive legal writing, credibility is not inferred from conclusions alone. It is constructed sentence by sentence. Analytic correctness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Supervising attorneys read prose as evidence of intellectual control, treating disciplined style as proof of substantive mastery. Yet legal writing scholarship has largely framed clarity as a matter of pedagogy or professionalism rather than as a structural theory of ethos.

This article reframes predictive writing as institutional rhetoric. Within the hierarchical environment of law practice, cognitive fluency governs professional trust: writing that is easy to process yet disciplined in reasoning reads as competence. Drawing …

Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice Meets Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Compassionate Written Judgments In Child Protection Cases, Shelley Kierstead

All Papers

Society has become acutely aware that trauma arises from many life events and manifests in a range of physical and psychological symptoms. The legal community is increasingly recognizing that clients living with trauma effects would be much better served with trauma-informed services. While much of the emerging literature in the legal field focuses on lawyers’ work, there is growing recognition that judges can also play a role in responding effectively to trauma.

In child protection cases, trauma frequently exists at different yet related levels – for the child who is the subject of protection proceedings, and for one or more …

Lists In Legal Drafting: How Brain Science Can Help Student Drafters Produce Documents That Are Easier To Read And Comprehend, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Lists play an important role in legal drafting of every type. A list helps the reader break down larger pieces of information, and a well-constructed list's visuals can aid in comprehension. A good list can also head off future legal disputes by making it easier for all parties to read and understand its contents. But a list, in and of itself, is not beneficial unless it is organized in such a way that the brain can easily group like items. By understanding the basics of how the brain processes information, the legal writer can better understand how to group pieces …

Get With The Pronoun, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Finding Balance: Using Employment Law Problems To Achieve Multiple Learning Goals In Persuasive Legal Writing, Rosa Castello

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Legal Writing professors, like myself, face the same challenge each new semester: how can I effectively and efficiently help students learn one of the most important skills for a practicing lawyer? And one large hurdle in this quest to make our students good legal writers is creating a trial motion or appellate brief problem that helps them develop the particular skills required for persuasive legal writing. The act of creating the problem is sometimes like tightrope walking̶ finding just the right balance of facts and law to challenge students and help develop and enhance vital research, analytical, organizational, writing, …

The Art Of The Effective Reply, Peter M. Mansfield

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Supreme Verbosity: The Roberts Court's Expanding Legacy

Marquette Law Review

The link between courts and the public is the written word. With rare exceptions, it is through judicial opinions that courts communicate with litigants, lawyers, other courts, and the community. Whatever the court’s statutory and constitutional status, the written word, in the end, is the source and the measure of the court’s authority.

It is therefore not enough that a decision be correct—it must also be fair and reasonable and readily understood. The burden of the judicial opinion is to explain and to persuade and to satisfy the world that the decision is principled and sound. What the court says, …

Resurrecting (And Modernizing) The Research Treasure Hunt, Nancy E. Vettorello

Articles

First-year associates will spend forty-five percent of their time on legal research; second- and third-year associates will spend thirty percent. And unfortunately, employers find their associates’ research skills lacking. This is not a new complaint. Employers have been complaining for more than a hundred years that recent law graduates cannot research well. None of this is lost on those who teach legal research, who have long debated the best way to do so. Techniques for teaching research have changed over time, and methods once thought appropriate were sometimes later disfavored. Changes were driven both by pedagogy and by the ever-changing …

Attracting Undue Scrutiny On Appeal: An Appellate Judge's Perspective, Marshall L. Davidson Iii

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Deciding Not To Decide: A Limited Defense Of The Silent Concurrence, Alexander I. Platt

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Writing In Law Reviews, Bar Association Journals, And Blogs (Part I), Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Lawyer's commonly write as the client's representative, but this article explores three opportunities for lawyers who wish also to write sometimes in non-representational roles. Part I here discusses writing or co-writing law review articles.

Creac In The Real World, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article will examine the extent to which common legal writing paradigms such as CREAC are used by attorneys in the "real world" of practice when writing on the kinds of issues law students may encounter in the first-year legal writing classroom. To that end, it will focus on the analysis of two factor-based criminal law issues: whether a defendant was in custody and whether a defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In focusing on "first-year" issues, the article seeks not to examine whether organizational paradigms are used at all in legal analysis, but to discover whether and how …

Not Your Mother's Will: Gender, Language, And Wills, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

“Boys will be boys, but girls must be young ladies” is an echoing patriarchal refrain from the past. Formal equality has not produced equality in all areas, as demonstrated by the continuing wage gap. Gender bias lingers and can be identified in language. This Article focuses on Wills, one of the oldest forms of legal documents, to explore the intersection of gender and language. With conceptual antecedents in pre-history, written Wills found in Ancient Egyptian tombs embody the core characteristics of modern Wills. The past endows the drafting and implementation of Wills with a wealth of traditions and experiences. The …

Writing Reasoned Decisions And Opinions: A Guide For Novice, Experienced, And Foreign Judges, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

The primary focus of this Article is on providing practical advice on how to write a reasoned decision or opinion (Section IV). However, experts in education theory have found that adult learners do best when they understand why certain information is being presented, so the discussion of how to write reasoned judgments will be preceded by a brief section on why such judgments are necessary or useful (Section III). This Article also considers what a reasoned decision or opinion actually is as a preliminary matter (Section II), since it is impossible to write such a document without a true appreciation …

Creac In The Real World, Diane B. Kraft

Cleveland State Law Review

This article will examine the extent to which common legal writing paradigms such as CREAC are used by attorneys in the “real world” of practice when writing on the kinds of issues law students may encounter in the first-year legal writing classroom. To that end, it will focus on the analysis of two factor-based criminal law issues: whether a defendant was in custody and whether a defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In focusing on “first-year” issues, the article seeks not to examine whether organizational paradigms are used at all in legal analysis, but to discover whether and how …

Explanatory Parentheticals Can Pack A Persuasive Punch, Eric P. Voigt

McGeorge Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Opinion Writing: An Annotated Bibliography, Ruth C. Vance

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Telling Through Type: Typography And Narrative In Legal Briefs, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Most legal authors today self-publish, using basic word-processing software and letting the software’s default settings determine what their documents will look like when printed. As these settings are not optimized for legal texts, they do so at their peril. The default font Times New Roman, for example, as Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook warns, is "utterly inappropriate for long documents [such as] briefs."

Commentators have started urging a more deliberate approach to legal typography. Their suggestions, however, have been content-neutral, intended for all legal texts and focused on goals such as legibility and readability.

Typography, however, has much greater potential. The …

The Law Reviews: Do Their Paths Of Glory Lead But To The Grave?, John Doyle

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Toa Construction Co., Inc. V. Tsitsires, Jessica Tong

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overstaying Your Welcome: The Martin Act And Post-Effective-Date Tenants, Kristopher Ferranti

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing Beyond Memos And Briefs: An Annotated Bibliography, Carrie Teitcher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.