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) …

Of Reptiles And Velcro: The Brain's Negativity Bias And Persuasion, Kenneth D. Chestek

Nevada Law Journal

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 …