A Legal Writing Reading List

This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...

How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...

Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...

A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former President Donald Trump on June 8, 2023, on multiple criminal charges related to classified documents...

In our increasingly polarized society, claims that prosecutions are politically motivated, racially motivated, or just plain arbitrary are more common...

The lawyer-client relationship is pivotal in providing access to courts. This paper presents results from a large-scale field experiment exploring how...

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the last Supreme Court term was the extraordinary public discourse on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. According to...

This Essay was prepared for a Symposium at the Yale Law School, celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of The Nature of the Judicial Process, the...

Legal ethicists, advocacy groups, and politicians have called for greater restrictions on the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when parties...

In our last column, we explored different ways of incorporating quotes into legal writing. And although the whole point of quoting is to use another...

Lawyers often have to rely on others’ words — words written by legislatures, courts, or parties to a contract. But improper use or overuse of quotes...

National judicial systems within the European Union (EU) face pressures toward alignment under the policy agendas for judicial cooperation connected...

It is—and has long been—well known that the Executive’s power is expanding. To date, there are two dominant analyses of the Judiciary’s role in that...

Judicial reasoning and rhetoric should be mutually reinforcing, but they often end up at odds. Edwards v. Vannoy offers an unusually rich opportunity...

It’s commonly said that words are lawyers’ stock-in-trade. But we also deal with numbers: dates, times, dollar amounts, pre-judgment interest rates...

About twenty-five years ago, in the introduction to his book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Jerry Cohen described encountering an unfamiliar...