Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [63]
Finally, consider these opening paragraphs of a draft article on campaign finance law (also mentioned on p. 49 above):
Campaign speech has long been a controversial topic among scholars and commentators. Much attention has been devoted to the Supreme Court's treatment of individual expenditures, contributions and spending in Buckley v. Valeo. Congress' recent consideration of campaign finance reform provides an ideal opportunity to revisit the 1976 Supreme Court decision that addressed the free speech implications of limits on federal campaign-related activities.
This essay briefly discusses the effects of such limits on individual speech, the disproportionate treatment of speech by the media and justifications presented by several members of the Court in the 2000 decision, Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC.
Let me begin by giving a concrete situation. Imagine you are outraged about a particular candidate's stand on something. [More concrete details follow, aimed at showing that there's a basic First Amendment right to spend money to express your views about candidates.] ...
What does the first sentence add? Very little: Virtually all readers will already know how controversial the subject is. The same goes for the second sentence. The third sentence says something nontrivial, by suggesting that this article is relevant to “Congress' recent consideration of campaign finance reform,” but most of the rest of the sentence isn't helpful either.
That's a lot of unnecessary generalities—and at the very beginning of the article, which sets the tone for what follows. Here's an alternative, with the surplusage cut out:
Imagine you are outraged about a particular candidate's stand on something. [More concrete details] ...
May the law restrict this sort of speech, in the name of preventing corruption or equalizing people's voices? May the law allow the media to editorialize about elections while limiting speech by others? These questions are made especially relevant by the enactment of the new campaign finance bill. This essay will briefly discuss them, with a special focus on the Justices' arguments in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC.
Not perfect—the last two sentences are clunkier than they should be—but at least each part adds something to the argument.
D. Needless Tangential Detail
Organize your narration around the needs of your argument, rather than around the internal structure of the facts that you've learned while doing your research.
When you've learned a lot about a subject in writing your paper, it's tempting to just put all the facts down on paper using whatever internal structure (for instance, chronological) the facts have. Say you read all the Supreme Court cases related to some doctrine that you'll apply; it's tempting to describe each of those cases. Or say you're writing about the legal regulation of nonlethal weapons, such as pepper sprays: It's tempting to explain in detail how the weapons work, the chemicals they use, the subtle differences between the chemicals, and the like.
But not all this detail will be important to your claim, and readers will see much of it as a needless (and often boring) tangent. First, focus on what the readers need to know, and cut the remainder.
Second, articulate what's left in ways that are most useful to readers. Thus, for instance, if a state law limits pepper sprays to 2½ ounces, don't focus on that—instead, figure out how many defensive uses that amounts to (one? five? ten?). The reader wants to know what the restriction will do in practice, not how it's defined as a matter of physics or chemistry.
XIV. WRITING: WORD/PHRASE PROBLEMS TO WATCH FOR
A. Legalese/Bureaucratese
Write like normal people speak, not like lawyers or bureaucrats tend to write. Don't write “Opposition to the bill is needed on the grounds that the means will produce little or no desirable ends.” Saying