Principles of Legal Writing

No matter who you are, or what your background is, you will one day have to encounter legal writing. This course is designed for students interested in law school and those interested in improving their technical and analytical writing skills. Students are expected to draft and edit a variety of legal writings through exposure to litigation pleadings, transactional documents, and journalistic and academic articles regarding legal issues. The goal of the course is to teach students how to read, analyze, and write effectively about the law. Students also learn how to brief a case, how to read a statute, the basics of legal citation, and major schools of legal reasoning and analysis. There are many different kinds of legal writing. Any given day, an attorney may need to draft a complaint to initiate a lawsuit, an indemnity provision in a lease, an opinion letter to advise a client of the legal risks inherent in a particular course of action, or an appellate brief arguing why a judge should agree with a contested interpretation of the law. Each of these tasks requires writing that is clear, concise, and convincing. Each also requires slightly different approaches to writing. Ultimately though, whatever the task, good legal writing should never be legalese.