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A Practical Guide To Legal Writing and L

A Practical Guide to Legal Writing.

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Emmanuel Nana Kwesi Gyebi
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70 views4 pages

A Practical Guide To Legal Writing and L

A Practical Guide to Legal Writing.

Uploaded by

Emmanuel Nana Kwesi Gyebi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies

Volume 4 Article 17

1-1-1995

A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method


Scott Rollwagen

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/djls

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative


Works 3.0 License.

Recommended Citation
Scott Rollwagen, "A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method" (1995) 4 Dal J Leg Stud 312.

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Schulich Law Scholars. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies by an authorized editor of Schulich Law Scholars. For
more information, please contact [email protected].
A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method
John C. Dernbach, Richard V. Singleton II, Cathleen S. Wharton,
& Joan M Ruhtenberg
Littleton: Fred B. Rothman, 1994, 399 pp.

Reviewed by Scott Rollwagent

It is quite easy to dismiss the study of legal method and legal


writing as a necessary but tedious adjunct to the study of "real" law.
The first-year curricula of many law schools reflect this aversion to
the study of legal method by itself. Often, one finds courses in
legal writing and research given only a fraction of the credit value
assigned to the traditional "core" courses such as contracts, torts,
and property.
Part of the reason why legal writing and legal method is given
such supplementary status springs from the way we think about
method in general. While we may acknowledge that the study of
how to think and communicate as a lawyer is necessary, we find it
hard to bring ourselves to focus on the study of legal method as
divorced from "real" law. The study of method is always at one
remove from "real" activity or "real" practice, and we consequently
find it difficult, as aspiring practitioners, to talk about doing law
before being able actually to do law. We would much rather get
right to the point.
In some quarters, this antipathy to the study of method couples
itself with a more political concern regarding the study of legal
method. Over the centuries, as the law has been used by the more
powerful groups within society to legitimize and to perpetuate their
dominance, the forms, the practices, and indeed the language of
legal method grew to delineate the exclusive province of an elite
band of specialists. These specialists, and these specialists alone,
were able to understand and manipulate the legal mechanisms that
define our society.
A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method advocates
an approach to writing and to method that would minimize some
of the gratuitous complexity that we find in some legal writing. As

t B.A. (Manitoba), LL.B. anticipated 1996 (Dalhousie).

312
BOOK REVIEWS 313

the title to the book implies, it focusses on legal writing and legal
method as primarily a pragmatic practice. Any exercise, any form
of writing in the legal profession, is first and foremost a goal-
directed activity. No matter how complex, or mundane, or socially
significant a particular legal problem might be, it always makes
demands of a lawyer that he communicate an answer in such a way,
and to such people, as will resolve it in the best possible way.
The book recognizes that lawyers are, first and foremost,
communicators. As the authors note: "The law is a literary
profession; legal writing should and often does approach the level of
good literature." 1 While some might dismiss this claim as
needlessly sanguine, there is more than a grain of truth in it. The art
of writing good literature is the art of taking control of one's
audience. The good lawyer must similarly take control of her
audience. Whether the form of communication involved be an
office memo or an appellate factum, the most effective legal writing
takes into account both its audience and its effect on that audience.
This focus on audience differentiates the book from a more
traditional, or law-centered (as opposed to reader-centered) view of
legal writing. The law-centered school has as its most extreme
members those lawyers of the past who carried on their profession
in a language that was intentionally designed to differentiate itself
from the language of lay people. This law-centred approach,
however, did not remain buried in the tomb of the 19th century.
Post-modernist legal scholars and increasingly activist appellate
justices seem to be re-establishing a law-centred view of legal
writing. The latter, in their voluminous judgments, seem
determined to use language as a means of finding, and revealing,
the secret truths hidden within the vast body of our law. In
demolishing such truths, on the other hand, the former group
employ a self-referential, jargonized discourse, the impenetrability
of which would make a 19th century English Chancery barrister
envious.
A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method provides a
welcome breath of fresh air to anyone who has been subjected for
any period of time to the perambulations of the law-centred school
of legal writing. It provides in its opening chapters an introduction
to basic legal concepts and interpretive skills that ground any good

1]. C. Dernbach et al., A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method

(Littleton: Fred B. Rothman, 1994) at 174.


314 DALHOUSIE JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES

writer's ability to get her message across. It then builds on this


foundation by discussing basic concepts of legal writing in a
surprisingly lucid and focussed manner. This is a book which is not
afraid to say that a particular way of articulating a legal opinion is
plainly better than another way of articulating the same opinion.
The book is full of explicit and concrete examples of what
constitutes both good and bad legal writing.
The book's overall message is that writing is an intensely
disciplined process that can be reduced to a few basic principles and
learned. It is not, as some judges and scholars would treat it, a
haphazard, muddled process that must be endured in order to get
at the truth. By treating such writing as a discipline, the book paints
the legal profession in much less elitist light. This book sees the
lawyer not as a sage but as a pragmatic problem-solver.
Perhaps the most endearing quality of the book is the way in
which it practices what it preaches. The book is written largely in
the second person, creating a tone markedly different from that
which one encounters in other works. It is much more interesting as
a reader to be told that I should do x when I write rather than being
told that x should be done when I write. The book is a written
tutorial, a clear and effective presentation of a topic that is all too
often apt to draw yawns. The book, in short, sees itself as an act of
communication, and exudes in many places a basic concern that its
message is getting across.
In a time when the importance of the written word might seem
to be declining, A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal
Method helps to restore one's faith in the medium of writing as a
central component of the lawyer's tools.

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