Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

Teaching Legal Reasoning In Law School, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

With the understanding that reasonable scholars and critics may differ, it is nevertheless this article's contention that law schools today must still strive to teach the basic logical principles-and process-of legal reasoning. By analogy, a swimmer must learn at least a few basic strokes in order to survive in his new environment. The same is true with law students and legal reasoning. An elementary foundation in legal reasoning skills, limited though it may be, is still better than nothing at all-especially when the latter alternative offers only confusion and misunderstanding.

The purpose of this article is to discuss one such …

How To Write And Speak More Effectively As Advocate, Negotiator, Or Counselor -- Suggestions To The Budding Lawyer, Arthur R. Landever

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

How best to give you some ideas about legal communication? The traditional approach is to focus narrowly upon a particular type, for example, appellate oral argument. My approach is different. I view communication in its total aspect -- whatever its general nature (e.g. writing or speech), degree of formality (e.g. brief or office negotiation), or audience (e.g. lawyer or layman). My ideas proceed from a fundamental assumption: As a student you can gain insights about the subject, by first studying the broad canvas. As you then reflect upon any particular mode, it can be set against that background. The suggestions …

Rewriting First Year Legal Writing Programs, Michael Botein

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legislative Process And Drafting In U.S. Law Schools: A Close Look At The Lammers Report, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Clear Legal Drafting: What's Holding Us Back?, F. Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Should Plain English Be Legislated?, F. Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Teaching Legal Writing In The Law Schools (With A Special Nod To Legal Drafting), Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Book Review. Dale, William, Legislative Drafting: A New Approach, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legal Drafting: Writing As Thinking, Or, Talk-Back From Your Draft And How To Exploit It, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Wanted: Advocates Who Can Argue In Writing, J. Clifford Wallace

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

If We Can't Teach Our Students To Write... Let's Examine Some Alternatives That May Have A Chance To Work, Michael Botein

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Seminar On Legal Drafting Raises Questions On Teaching, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Professionalizing Legislative Drafting: A Realistic Goal?, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The teaching of skills that result in sound legislative drafting is neglected in law schools, and professionalism in legislative drafting is lacking on both the federal and state fronts. With the adoption by the American Bar Association of seven major principles relating to the drafting of federal legislation, perhaps there is more hope now that there will be a move toward professionalism.

Choosing Law Clerks In Massachusetts, Robert Braucher

Vanderbilt Law Review

About the summer of 1875" Chief Justice Horace Gray of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts "began a practice, which he continued until the end of his judicial career, of employing a young graduate of the Harvard Law School as a secretary. At first he paid the expense of this from his own purse, but before he had been many years at Washington" as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States "the Government provided for the appointment of a clerk for each of the justices of the Supreme Court. His colleagues generally appointed as their clerks stenographers …

Electronic Aids To The Drafting Of Legal Instruments, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

General Considerations In Legal Drafting, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Headnotes, Journal Editor

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This issue marks the close of the first year for the Vanderbilt International. What it will become in the future is anyone's guess with General Hershey threatening a drastic reduction in the number of law students next year. In the long run, however, the publication can probably fill a very useful role as either an interdisciplinary magazine with a legal bias or as a law journal with an interdisciplinary bent. The former goal has been, by choice and necessity, the object of this year's Editors. Next year's staff will do as they like.

Regardless of emphasis, however, the increasing importance …

The End Of Empire, Fred D. Schneider

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Within the space of a generation, the British Empire has disintegrated in a way that appears extraordinary, even in retrospect. "How marvelous it all is," Lord Rosebery exclaimed at the end of the nineteenth century. If marvelous in its growth, the Empire has been no less significant in the manner of its passing.

The decline of great empires exerts a peculiar fascination over the mind of the historian; indeed, more has been written about the fall of Rome than about the death of any other political entity. Diverse and contradictory theories are advanced to explain a complex historical phenomenon, and …

Mellinkoff: The Language Of The Law, Ronald L. Goldfarb

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Language of the Law. By David Mellinkoff

Cooper: Writing In Law Practice, John L. Fitzgerald

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Writing in Law Practice. By Frank E. Cooper

The Diseases Of Legislative Language, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this article Professor Dickerson examines some of the most basic problems facing the legislative draftsman in his attempt to obtain clarity in statutes. He discusses the "diseases" of ambiguity, over-vagueness, over-precision, over- and under-generality and obesity, and distinguishes them from useful devices with which they are often confused.

Edmund M. Morgan, Felix Frankfurter

Vanderbilt Law Review

On a rough estimate, there were some two hundred items of every variety of legal writing: text books, case books, an unpretentious but wise little volume on the Introduction to the Study of Law, the successive stages of the Code of Evidence of the American Law Institute, essays scattered in dozens of law reviews, as well as those contained between book covers, like his Carpentier Lectures, book reviews, surveys of developments in the law both in the Nation and latterly in Tennessee. He has not been a one-subject scholar. But in one field, Evidence,he has become the contemporary master. History …

The Difficult Choice Between "And" And "Or", Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legislative Drafting In London And In Washington, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legislative Drafting: American And British Practices Compared, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The principal difference between legislative drafting for the British Parliament and legislative drafting for the American Congress, Mr. Dickerson declares, arises from the fact that the many-authored legislation 'proposed in Congress is extremely vulnerable to revision and redrafting as it makes its way through subcommittee hearings and committee debates, whereas the legislation in Parliament, prepared by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, is much more likely to be enacted in its original form. This article points up the problems inherent in drafting statutes in a complex world.

Symbolic Logic: A Razor-Edged Tool For Drafting And Interpreting Legal Documents, Layman E. Allen

Articles

A large amount of the litigation based on written instruments-whether statute, contract, will, conveyance or regulation-can be traced to the draftsman's failure to convey his meaning clearly. Frequently, of course, certain items may purposely be left ambiguous, but often the question in issue is due to an inadvertent ambiguity that could have been avoided had the draftsman clearly expressed what he intended to say. In this Article it is suggested that a new approach to drafting, using certain elementary notions of symbolic logic, can go a long way towards eliminating such inadvertent ambiguity. This new approach makes available to draftsmen …

Book Reviews, James B. Earle, J. Allen Smith, Samuel E. Stumpf, Ingram Bloch, J. Raymond Denney

Vanderbilt Law Review

Book Reviews

The Oppenheimer Case: The Trial of a Security System

By Charles P. Curtis

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Pp. xi, 281. $4.00

reviewer: Ingram Bloch

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Trial Tactics and Methods

By Robert E. Keeton

New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1954. Pp. xxiv, 438. $6.65

reviewer: J. Raymond Denney

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Military Law under the Uniform Code of Military Justice

By William B. Aycock and Seymour W. Wurfel

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Pp. xviii, 430.

reviewer: James B. Earle

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Why Johnny Can't Read

By Rudolf Flesch

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955. Pp. ix, …

How To Write A Law, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legislative Drafting And The Law Schools, Reed Dickerson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

On Legal Style, George John Miller

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.