Our goal in legal writing is to give our reader the necessary information as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’re not writing mystery novels, where the goal is to conceal the killer’s identity until the very last moment. Our job is to get to the point. Too often, though, legal writers obscure their main points or delay sharing them, which forces their readers to wait to find out the key idea. Keeping our readers in the dark frustrates them. It also makes it harder for them to follow what we’re saying. When we bury or defer our main point, it taxes the reader’s attention, since the reader is trying to simultaneously (a) figure out what our main point is, and (b) digest the support for that idea. The quicker we can explain the former, the quicker it frees up the reader’s capacity to understand the latter. There are many things we can do to help bring our main points forward. Here are two specific tweaks we can make to help readers get the point right away when discussing previous cases.
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
These are momentous times for the comparative analysis of judicial behaviour. Once the sole province of US political scientists, a new generation of...
Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...
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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...
Legal ethicists, advocacy groups, and politicians have called for greater restrictions on the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when parties...
In recent years, the federal courts have seen a plethora of lawsuits originated by states challenging federal government actions. As a result, there...
This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...
This Essay reports data on the impact of Bruen and its predecessor, Heller, on gun rights cases. Put mildly, the impact was substantial, not only in...
In this paper we investigate whether gender is associated with the content of judicial opinions in the U.S. courts of appeals. Using a topic model...
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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...
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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...
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Members of the public who are representing themselves in their own legal matters may visit a library seeking legal information. Therefore, the...