Our Legal Writing Class Disaster

A standard interview question is, "What did you like least about law school?"

The proper answer is something along the lines of, "I loved all of it! It was fabulous! I wouldn't change a thing!"

The more truthful response, for me, "Legal Research and Writing. It was the most useless, destructive class I've ever had."

For a school that prides itself on its writing program, this place is deluded. This is what a writing program should teach. (The University of Texas has a few things going for it.) Here are some of Wayne Schiess's highlights:

• What ambiguity is and how to avoid it.
• What vagueness is and how it is used appropriately.
• The various words and phrases that create authority, obligation, entitlement, or discretion and how to use them consistently and correctly.
• The canons of construction and how to draft for them.
• Organizing the specific provisions within the topics of a contract.
• The principles and practices of the plain-English movement in legal drafting.
• Proper drafting of definitions.
• Spotting and avoiding unnecessary formalisms, archaisms, and legalisms.
• Proper opening and closing language in a drafted document.

This curriculum is pracitcal. It may even have helped me to learn in my other classes. For a profession so heavily vested in language, little to no effort is made around here to teach us about it. Why is it that the comma cost $2 million? What is ambiguity in a contract? Why does it matter how provisions are organized?

All we talked about, it seemed, was Blue-booking. Fat lot of good that did me -- now I have to learn how to Maroon-book anyway! Legal research and writing should involve more than learning how to use LexisNexis and where to find things in the world's most arcane and confused style manual. In the long run, it is going to be far more important to be able to eliminate ambiguity from our writing than know the proper order of authorities for a string cite.

The writing program here is a blight on our education. Do something about it, please, oh powers that be! Stop hanging onto the delusion that you have a good program! The only reasons our graduates are so widely praised for their writing ability are that a) most of us have to be decent writers even to be accepted here, and b) we learn a thing or two about thinking and analysis, and that is reflected in our writing also.

We are praised for our writing in spite of the program here, not because of it. And lest you think this rant is sour grapes on my part, I did quite well in the class.

After I learned to put style over substance.

Comments

[PatAncester]

"No tienes pelos en la lengua!" In English: you tell it the way you see it, without worrying too much how others will react. Way to go!