Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [138]
The worst thing you can do is let your fear of rejection keep you from circulating the article as widely as possible, or recirculating it if it wasn't picked up the first time around. Remember: It's not personal. It's not about you. It happens to your professors all the time. And no one will know.
B. Choosing a Title
1. The three functions of a title
A title should do three things. Most importantly, the title should persuade people to read the article. When busy people do a Westlaw or Lexis search that yields fifty items, how do they choose what to read? They look at the authors' names and at the titles. If the title looks helpful—not necessarily exciting, but helpful—they'll read further. The title is your opportunity to get people to devote time to at least reading the Introduction.
Second, the title can frame people's thinking once they start reading your piece. If a title focuses the reader on a concept, the reader is more likely to keep that concept in mind.
Third, the title can help readers remember your article. Remember, though, that a memorable title is of little use to you if it wasn't attractive enough to get people to read the piece in the first place.
So how should you choose your title? Let me suggest the following approach.
2. Start with a descriptive title
Start with a descriptive title, which summarizes the general question that your article is answering (though not necessarily your specific answer). If a person's query comes up with an article called “Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment,” the person will have a good sense of the article's substance. Naturally, the title can capture only a small part of your point, but it can capture enough to give readers some idea of whether the article is relevant to their interests. Purely descriptive titles might not be that memorable, and might not much help frame readers' thinking, but they're good at getting people to read the piece.
Of course, it's not enough that your title be comprehensible to you; make it comprehensible to your readers. I named one of my articles “Test Suites,” but late in the publication process realized that few readers would know what that means. Renaming the piece “Test Suites: A Tool for Improving Student Articles” made the purpose and value of the article clearer (though I think the title could have been made better still).
It's acceptable for an article to have a subtitle as well as a title. This can let you communicate two ideas, one general and one more specific. For instance, “Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop Others from Speaking About You” conveys both a general point (the article is about the First Amendment problems with information privacy laws) and a specific one (the problems arise because “information privacy” really refers to a supposed right to stop others from speaking about you). The combination is long—perhaps too long—but it takes advantage of its length. Likewise, “Academic Legal Writing: Student Notes, Law Review Articles, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review” gives people a short summary (the book is about academic legal writing) but also tells them that it's useful for four different purposes.
3. Try including your key innovative concept in the title
If your article focuses on a particular concept—and especially if it pioneers the concept—try to include the concept in your title. Say you're writing an article about laws requiring passersby to help strangers whom they see to be in peril. Your main thesis is that these laws might have the perverse effect of discouraging some people from cooperating with the police; but you also think this broader idea of anticooperative effects of law deserves more attention in other contexts as well.
“Duties to Rescue and Anticooperative Effects of Law” may be a good title: It tells potential readers that your article is both about duties to rescue and about the general problem of law discouraging cooperation with the authorities; it