Do practicing lawyers get to vote on legal-writing controversies? Not if you ask some self-styled pundits. Like other forms of writing, legal writing has its descriptivists (“Here’s how lawyers do write”) and its prescriptivists (“Here’s how lawyers should write”). The prescriptivists, who dominate the field, have the virtues of idealism and of trying to foment large-scale change in the profession. But they are…
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