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Full-Text Articles in Law

On Lawyers And Copy Editors, Jonathan I. Tietz May 2020

On Lawyers And Copy Editors, Jonathan I. Tietz

Michigan Law Review

Review of Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.


“Clear Beyond The Peradventure Of A Doubt,” Or, Plain English, Curtis E.A. Karnow Jan 2014

“Clear Beyond The Peradventure Of A Doubt,” Or, Plain English, Curtis E.A. Karnow

Curtis E.A. Karnow

The article urges judges and lawyers to write briefs and opinions in plain English. This outreach from the legal world to the public is important. As the public understands what courts do, the public will be increasingly supportive of the courts, more likely to comply with courts directives, and more likely to engage in meaningful debate concerning the justice system. In this sense, writing in plain English is a civic duty.


Revising The California Style Manual, Curtis E.A. Karnow Dec 2011

Revising The California Style Manual, Curtis E.A. Karnow

Curtis E.A. Karnow

The note compares styles of legal writing and citation form, and urges changes to style manuals to enable smoother writing, a minimum of citation, and plain English.


Bad Writing: Some Thoughts On The Abuse Of Scholarly Rhetoric, Jethro K. Lieberman Jan 2005

Bad Writing: Some Thoughts On The Abuse Of Scholarly Rhetoric, Jethro K. Lieberman

Articles & Chapters

Like most kinds of writing, academic writing rarely shines, but far more often than ordinary writing scholarly prose is murky and impenetrable. This brief jeu d'esprit considers several forms of bad writing, rejecting the claim, increasingly made in academic quarters, that "difficult writing" is necessary to the scholarly enterprise. Bloated, foggy, and enigmatic prose masquerades as profundity that escapes conventional mental grooves. In fact it is useless, unethical, and taken far enough, evil.


Fuller And Language, Joseph Vining Jan 1999

Fuller And Language, Joseph Vining

Book Chapters

His style made him distinctive. His substance made him distinctive. The two crossed, were genetically related as we now say. Style and substance each drew on and was implied by the other. One point of their crossing was his sense of the nature of human language; what language was and could be, what it was not and could never be. In 1930, early in his work, Fuller took up the problem of language in a series of articles. Toward the end of his time he republished this initial ground-establishing effort as the little book we now have, Legal Fictions, …