Highest New York's Court's Briefs Generally Not Improving Last 40 Years

The language in the briefs to the New York Court of Appeals-- that state's highest court-- have gotten less and less plain between 1969 and 2008, except for less use of the passive voice, according to an article pending for publication in the Suffolk University Law Review. Bryan A. Garner and I, among many others, have much work to do in this connection.

Interview of a Master, about a Master

One of the patron saints of this blog, Bryan A. Garner, is interviewed re his and Justice Antonin Scalia's new book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts here.

As an Illness Subsides, the Remedy Is Less Necessary

Sam Glover has an interesting post in the Lawyerist on The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, great essayist of the mid-twentieth century (Can't help putting in a plug for "On a Florida Key"-- if there's a better essay in English, it doesn't jump to mind.). He was also the author of Charlotte's Web.
Strunk and White is starting to seem dated. One reason is that White was not a grammarian by profession. What I learned from the Elements of Style was shown to me to be wrong by Bryan Garner himself. The second reason is that White carried the day in his struggles against the bad writing of his time. It reminds me of the history of the doctrine of universal salvation. Universalism was at one time the ninth largest denomination in America, but it shriveled as its competitors learned that being hateful of and hopeless for the grand majority of the human race was bad for their business (When was the last time you heard a hellfire sermon?). The doctrine wasn't beaten- the competitors tacitly adopted it.
So it is with Strunk and White. Even bad writers today feel uncomfortable with sentences that begin "There is" or a lengthy, chewy mouthful of a sentence.
Strunk's instruction may have been enough for White. White was superlatively talented, even a genius-- maybe he didn't need any more guidance (Though I note that he was married to a brilliant editor.) For the rest of us, here at the beginning of the 21st Century, I recommend John R. Trimble's Writing with Style after decades of working with this stuff, its ideas forcibly knocked me upside the head. Before, I saw through a glass darkly, now I'm face to face with why and how White said what he did.

Wisdom from the Master

Ten legal writing tips from Bryan Garner are here.

Laughs for Legal Writers

After a week of preparing for a trial that is almost certain not to happen, a day of domestic squabbling, and preparing to move, I got word that The Green Bag, a most entertaining law journal, had chosen its best examples of legal writing for last year. I had occasion thereby to read The Green Bag's Greatest Quips 1997-2002. It includes such gems as a recasting of the first sentence of Milton's Paradise Lost as if it had been written by a lawyer, a spoof showing how a group of academics had ranked U.S. News & World Report below other magazines, and newly appointed Supreme Court justice David Souter's report of why he participated in the Christmas caroling led by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist: "I have to. Otherwise, I get all the tax cases."
Other people you know of or should know of who are associated with this enterprise are libertarian legal scholar Richard A. Epstein, Leonard Garment of the Nixon White House, legal writing maven Bryan A. Garner, and comparative constitutional law professor Mary Ann Glendon.

Bryan Garner's Coming to Town

He sees you when you're sleeping/
He knows when you're awake/
He knows if you've been bad or good/
So be good for goodness' sake!

The fountainhead of legal writing wisdom, Bryan A. Garner, is touring in February, March and on April 1. He'll be giving his Advanced Legal Writing and Editing Seminar in
Kansas City, St. Louis, Miami, Louisville, Nashville, Little Rock, Houston, Austin, Phoenix and Dallas. In Phoenix and Dallas, he will be additionally offering Advanced Legal Drafting the day after.
I took the writing and editing seminar a couple of years ago. He knows things that I have yet to learn, in spite of my having had years of experience and having been a high school English teacher. It was humbling; I was the grammar and usage maven in my world when I was a young man.
When I applied what I had learned at the seminar on my job, my boss's boss was unhappy with it.
Still, more and more of the judicial opinions that I read have the characteristic Garner touches: "fair but persuasive issues that have only one answer", hyphenated phrasal adjectives (Examples: 20-year-old sister, common-law claim, plain-view doctrine), and powerful conclusions. Garner turned me on to John R. Trimble's Writing with Style, the most helpful and enlightening book on writing that I can remember.

Why does a traveling Garner bring to mind Santa Claus at his most judgmental? Because few knowledgeable legal writers have not felt as Bryan Rutherford did in his haiku, which won Honorable Mention in the Texas State Bar Appellate Section Contest of 2004:

Only seventeen
syllables and, yet, Garner
could make it shorter.