Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [42]
B. Rewrite the Introduction After the Draft Is Done
1. Rewrite the introduction in light of how your thinking has changed
When you're done with writing an entire draft of the article, rewrite the introduction. Since you wrote it, you might have:
a. changed your claim,
b. found better arguments for your claim,
c. found better examples to illustrate your claim,
d. found interesting and unexpected consequences of your claim,
or changed your thinking in other ways. Writing an article should change your thinking about the subject. Even if your bottom line remains pretty much the same, surely your understanding of the argument is now much deeper than when you started.
Rewrite the introduction using this newly acquired understanding. You'll find that the new introduction better fits the rest of the article, and that it better promotes the article to the reader. In particular, make sure that you briefly mention all the important conclusions that the reader should take away from the article—not just your claim, but also the implications of the claim, such as those discussed in the last few pages.
Many readers will read only your introduction. Make sure that they get as much out of it as possible, both so they absorb more of your ideas, and so they have a higher opinion of you as a possible law clerk, colleague, co-counsel, consultant, or scholar.
2. Note all your important and nonobvious discoveries
Your article may have started as a way to make and prove one novel, nonobvious, useful, and sound claim. But in the process of writing your article, you might have found several other novel, nonobvious, useful, and sound things that you needed to say to prove that core claim. (If you have a mathematics or computer programming background, think of them as reusable lemmas or subroutines.)
These subsidiary discoveries will probably be less important than the main claim, but they may still be valuable. And some readers who are unpersuaded by the main claim, or don't find it that useful to them, may nonetheless accept and use these subsidiary discoveries.
Make sure that your Introduction lists all these discoveries, so that a reader who reads only the Introduction will learn about them, and so that a reader who reads the whole article won't miss their importance. You might even expressly note that your article makes several different though related observations. For example:
In Part III, I argue that these speech restrictions imposed in child custody cases are unconstitutional, except when they are narrowly focused on preventing one parent from undermining the child's relationship with the other; and the observations that lead to this proposal will, I hope, be useful even to readers who don't agree with the proposal itself. Here is a brief summary:
1. The best interests test leaves courts free to make custody decisions based on parents' speech, and to issue orders restricting their speech. Courts have taken advantage of this freedom and will surely do so again, as to a broad (and, to many, surprising) range of parental ideologies—depending on the time and place, atheist or fundamentalist, racist or pro-polygamist, pro-homosexual or anti-homosexual. The breadth of such restrictions should give pause to those who advocate exempting speech-based child custody decisions from constitutional scrutiny.
2. The First Amendment is implicated not only when courts issue orders restricting parents' speech, but also when courts make custody or visitation decisions because of what parents have said to the child, or are likely to say to the child. And just as the Equal Protection Clause bars child custody decisions that discriminate based on race, so the First Amendment presumptively bars child custody decisions that discriminate based on a parent's constitutionally protected speech.
3. Even when the parents' speech is religious, the Free Speech Clause is probably