Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [195]
“Aside from the significant political impact of the bill” doesn't add anything. The Senator can easily tell what the bill's political impact would be; you have no specialized knowledge on this subject beyond what she has.
Arguments can “carry little weight,” but laws are generally not described this way.
“Carries little weight” and “makes little difference” seem, in context, to mean the same thing.
“Despite public misconceptions” doesn't add anything. Sometimes it might, for instance if you were asked to research what the public thinks about the law. But in this problem, you probably don't know anything more about public attitudes than the Senator does.
“Loss of civil liberties” is vague: Does this refer to Second Amendment rights? To Fourth Amendment rights? To a general right to self-defense? If it's either of the first two, it should be made clearer. If it's the third, then the sentence is redundant. I inferred that it was indeed the third, because the paper didn't say anything later about the Second or the Fourth Amendments.
“Strong” is the wrong word to describe amendments.
The phrase “the bill” is repeated in the last sentence; the second occurrence should be changed to “it.” That's what pronouns are for.
B. Understand Your Source, p. 159
C. USA Today Survey Report, p. 170
1. The First Claim
A. For Sending an Article to Law Reviews
* [Note: These footnotes are, of course, explanations for the benefit of this book's readers. You shouldn't include footnotes in your cover letters, or overtly talk about novelty, nonobviousness, or utility—these points should be implicit in your letter, not explicit.]
The piece for which I wrote this letter was unusually short—about 10 pages—and I thought some readers might be troubled by this. I therefore decided to warn readers up front: People's judgments turn in large part on their expectations, so if they are warned to expect something short, they won't mind as much that it's short. Likewise, if there's something unusual about your article, you might want to mention it up front.
The article, incidentally, got picked up by a Top 20 primary journal.
† I'm trying to persuade readers that this is a hot field, and that the article will be useful to academics and will thus get cited.
‡ Saying that a law yields unexpected or counterproductive results tends to highlight that the piece is nonobvious.
§ Suggests that the subject is novel.
* Aimed at persuading people that this is useful.
B. For Sending a Reprint to Potential Readers
‡ I sent this letter to various criminal law professors, including casebook authors. With the casebook authors, part of my goal was to persuade them to cite the article in the casebook; but I thought it was better to suggest this indirectly.
* This is a very brief summary of the article's main claim. You might want to summarize your claim in a bit more detail, but remember that this cover letter's purpose is to persuade readers to read the Introduction. If you think one short sentence will do that, stick with the one sentence.
† These sentences are aimed at quickly communicating to the reader that the piece is novel, nonobvious, and useful.
‡ This connects the main claim to a broader theoretical issue.
ENDNOTES
1 “We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Law in Science and Science in Law, 12 Harv. L. Rev. 443, 460 (1899).
2See Insulted Thai Convicted, L.A. Times, Mar. 3, 1988, Metro sec., at 2.
3See Militia Act of May 8, 1792, ch. 33, § 1, 1 Stat. 271, 271; United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939).
4See Eugene Volokh, “Necessary to the Security of a Free State”, 83 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1 (2007).
5See Christopher L. Eisgruber & Lawrence G. Sager, The Vulnerability of Conscience: The Constitutional Basis for Protecting Religious Conduct, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1245, 1247 (1994).
6 This discussion builds on Eugene Volokh, Intermediate