Judging
Lawsuits involve people. And rather than turn them into a disembodied “Plaintiff” and “Defendant,” opinions might better use their names. The opinions will be more direct and more human. (Of […]
Court Administration
REDLINES If there’s a good reason why many judicial opinions don’t use informative headings, I haven’t heard it. For readers, headings are a boon to navigating through the opinion. And […]
Court Administration
Check out the original paragraph from this opinion, which dealt with a motion to quash two subpoenas on grounds of attorney-client privilege. In the entire 262-word paragraph, covering 20 lines, […]
Law & Culture
Probably the worst small-scale fault in legal writing is unnecessary prepositional phrases, a fault that this column will keep going after. A noxious variant is the multiword preposition — a […]
Judging
One of the easiest ways to significantly improve all forms of legal writing is to replace heavy logical connectors with lighter ones (or none at all, where appropriate). Unfortunately, the […]
Judging
This Redlines column looks different from the previous ones. For one thing, it doesn’t have any redlines — but rather a simple before and after. Our writing guru, Joseph Kimble, […]
Judging
The long, long sentence is legal writing’s oldest curse. You’ve probably seen even worse than the original sentence, but it’s still way too long (83 words). I offer three different […]
Law & Culture
Our writing guru, Joseph Kimble, goes after some common blemishes. In the original opinion, he notes, the second half of the first sentence seems pointless. So does the third sentence, […]
Law & Culture
REDLINES Our writing guru, Joseph Kimble, simplifies and adds punch with some fairly quick fixes. He notes: The opinion deals with Defendant’s motion to quash Plaintiff’s notice of deposition. Before […]
