Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [46]
Most word processors can easily produce a table of contents from your section headings. Use this feature, partly to help the reader, but mostly to give you an overview of the article's structure as the headers reflect it. The table of contents may help show you some missing steps, or some redundancies.
The table of contents can also point out inconsistencies in your headings. Check, for instance, that you consistently use upper and lower case, and that the headings in each section are grammatically parallel.
Make sure that you use the editing commands needed to make the automatic table of contents work: In Word, for instance, use the Heading 1 through Heading 5 styles to set up the headings—control-alt-1 to control-alt-3 are usually configured as keyboard shortcuts for Headings 1 to 3—and when you insert the table of contents, ask for it to show up to 5 levels, and not just the default 3.
E. Note Down All Your Ideas
As you write, you'll often get interesting ideas that you can't act on immediately, for instance because they relate to another section or to something that you should research.
Write down these ideas before you forget them. I prefer to record them in my main document—either in the computer or on the printout that I'm editing—tagged with some text, such as “**.” You can put them into the section where they'll ultimately be discussed, in a master “to do” list at the top or bottom of the document, or even in whatever text you're currently working on. Because they're specially marked, you can easily find them later; and because they're written down, you won't lose what might be a great thought.
Likewise, at the end of a writing session, always write down what you plan to do next.10 That way, you won't lose your train of thought, and you will find it easier to start the next session.
VIII. TIPS ON RESEARCHING
There are five basic things you need to find for an article:
1. the legal rules that govern your field, and the cases and statutes that can help you identify the basic policy arguments for refining the legal rules;
2. the academic literature about your topic, so that you can (a) figure out whether your contribution is really novel, (b) learn the important arguments that you could build on, or try to rebut, and (c) find those legal rules or sample cases that you couldn't find on your own;
3. sample cases or incidents that can help you concretely and vividly illustrate your problem and your solution;
4. details on each especially important case or incident that you plan on featuring in your article, including details that might not be present in the usual places (such as in the report of the appellate decision);
5. empirical studies, often from other disciplines, that can help support your arguments, to the extent that your arguments rely on factual questions.
You should come to your writing project generally understanding how to find cases, statutes, and law review articles that deal with a given topic; your first-year research class must surely have taken care of that. I'll therefore just provide some extra tips that I think are particularly useful when writing articles and seminar papers.
A. Identifying Sample Cases and Incidents
Part I.B, p. 13, discusses ways you can identify an interesting topic to write on. Some of these ways will themselves point you to one or two cases that show how the topic arises in real life.
Look closely at these cases, and find more like them. Such sample cases:
a. help you figure out what you think about the problem,
b. introduce you to the arguments that have been made by the judges and lawyers in those cases,
c. show you what related problems your topic might implicate,
d. help you make the topic concrete for readers,
e. help you persuade readers that there really is a problem that needs to be solved, and
f. form the kernel of the test suite that you'll use in designing your claim (see Part II).
Generally, the more different examples you have to start with, the better.
How do you find more examples? Here are a