Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [187]
A similar response from a graduate of a roughly #50-ranked law school: “I got my note idea while doing research during 1L summer for my civ pro/antitrust professor, who generously let me run with a new issue of personal jurisdiction that I'd researched for him. I ended up winning the ABA Antitrust Section's annual writing prize, which was a huge honor and thrill.”
6. ... by asking faculty members
7. ... by asking practicing lawyers
9. ... by paying attention to interesting newspaper articles
10. ... by reading legal blogs
11. ... by finding articles that aim to identify unanswered problems
12. ... by looking back at your experience as an extern or summer associate
‡ From a law professor: “My second law review comment—on insurance coverage disputes—has been cited in the Witkin California law treatise twice, in 13 law review articles, 2 federal district court opinions, 2 state court opinions, and at least 2 trial court memoranda and 6 appellate court briefs. It arose from a long research assignment from my second year summer associate gig, something that took me about three weeks of time to canvass the relevant case law from all jurisdictions on when events ‘trigger’ comprehensive general liability insurance policies. I got permission from the law firm to use the research memo (without using client information, of course) as basically the background section and then added my own normative analysis when converting it into a comment.
“I think this comment has garnered the court opinion citations (and briefs, etc.) because it was on a subject that had spawned different rules in various jurisdictions, and that arose with surprising frequency in modern litigation, and being somewhat ‘unsexy’ had not attracted much scholarly attention.”
* From a law professor: “I got the idea for my note when I was volunteering at a public interest organization. A knotty legal problem came up and I was sent off to research it. That experience not only generated my note, but launched a career-long engagement with the topic that has produced numerous articles and a book.”
Likewise from a recent graduate, who's now clerking for a federal appellate judge: “During my 1L summer with a prominent civil rights group, my boss asked me for a memo on ‘whether corporations have the right to religious speech.’ I found almost nothing on the subject, as the boss expected, because the group was considering it for potential impact litigation in an underdeveloped area. Many lawyers give 1L interns similarly broad and unexplored topics, not because the topics [are] unimportant, but because a boss can afford to expend limitless 1L summer hours on lengthy research about the unknown. I picked mine for a note topic because it would (1) fill a void in literature, (2) meet real needs of litigants, (3) consider theory and law at a reasonably challenging level in an emerging area, (4) avoid the fact-bound limited utility of the case note, and (5) be something I already knew about and could handle writing about during the busiest two months of law school. My note won three awards and was on SSRN's top ten download list.”
13. ... by thinking back on your pre-law-school experiences
14. ... by attending symposia or panels
1. Avoid excessive mushiness
2. Avoid reliance on legal abstractions
A. What a Test Suite Is
C. Use the Test Suite
4. Connections: Importing from parallel areas
C. Decide What to Set Aside
A. Go Through Many Drafts
* Giles K. Chesterton, Beverly Hills High School.
H. Read the Draft with “New Eyes”
B. Insistence on Perfection
F. Metaphors
H. Undefended Assertions, and “Arguably”/“Raises Concerns”
1. Legal evidence
2. Errors in generalizing from the respondents to a broader group
* Actually, the margin of error is 196% x , where r is the fraction of respondents