Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [99]
2. Be cautious about relying on what lawyers say about history, economics, and other disciplines (or on what nonlawyers say about law). Look at what the authors who work in those disciplines say.
3. Particularly distrust newspapers, and, in large measure, radio and television transcripts.
4. Use words and phrases carefully, making sure you use the precise term instead of false synonyms: Homicide doesn't equal murder, and foreign-born doesn't equal noncitizen.
5. Include the necessary qualifiers: There's a difference between shouting “fire” and falsely shouting “fire.”
6. Use precise terms rather than vague ones: “Child” means different things to different people.
7. Carefully check any studies you use.
8. Be explicit about assumptions you make, such as assumptions of:
a. generalizability over time and space (does a one-year study from one city generalize to the whole country today?),
b. causation (did the study find that A caused B, or only that the two were correlated?), and
c. generalizability from the measured variable to the important variable (do falling arrest rates really mean falling crime rates?).
9. Avoid language that seems likely to mislead some readers.
XVIII. WRITING AND RESEARCHING: TIMELINE AND SUMMARY
A. Budgeting Your Time
Students often find themselves running late on their papers, and as a result having to cut corners at the end of the semester. Try to avoid this by focusing up front on what you need to do, and when you need to finish it by.
Here's a sample plan and time-chart that you can use. (Some date boxes correspond to several steps, because those steps need to be done together.) Note that you should budget a lot of time—many weeks—for writing, and less time for research. The bulk of the work is always in the writing.
B. Summary
1. Choose a topic
Choose an area that you find interesting, and that your faculty advisor thinks is a fertile ground for novel, nonobvious, and useful ideas. Find a problem in that area. Do research to learn more about the problem, and to figure out the possible solutions. Be open to switching to another problem if your research leads you to something more interesting or productive.
2. Make a claim
Figure out what claim you want to make—what you think is the best solution to your problem. Formulate it in one or two sentences. If your claim is prescriptive, design a test suite based on the factual scenarios that you've identified in your preliminary thinking, and refine the claim in light of what you learn from applying it to your test cases. Use the pointers in Part I to make the claim more novel, nonobvious, and useful.
Do your research (see Part VIII). Modify your claim in light of your research. Try to make your revised claim still more novel, nonobvious, and useful.
3. Write a first draft
Write an introduction. If you can't do that, you're probably not ready to write the draft—you're probably not yet sure what you want to say or how you want to say it. Look over Part III.A, p. 47, for some pointers.
When you're done with the introduction, write the rest of the article. In this phase, don't stop when you find yourself blocked on one section. Just get a draft out, even if it's rough and incomplete in spots. As you write, be open to revising your claim further.
Rewrite your introduction in light of what you've learned while writing the draft. Try to enrich your article by discussing connections to related issues.
4. Edit
Go through as many drafts as you can, polishing each paragraph, each sentence, and each word. Look over Parts XI through XV for some pointers.
Also go back over Parts I and V.F. Can you make the piece more novel, more nonobvious, and more useful? Can you tighten up its organization? Can you sell it better in your introduction? Can you add further interesting connections?
At some point in the editing process—preferably as early in the semester as possible—give a draft to your faculty advisor for comments. Also ask for comments from some friends whose