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Looking for some writing inspiration? Start with The New Yorker, the nation’s best-edited publication. Add Jeffrey Toobin, a prominent legal journalist. Now mix in his account there of an unsolved murder of a Seattle federal prosecutor. Here are ten great techniques at work in Toobin’s tale: 1. Start Sentences with Light
The U.S. Supreme Court’s current ideological divide may be the sharpest we’ve seen in a long time. Yet the justices do unite in one key respect: The current court boasts some of the best opinion writers in American legal history. Take the opinions from the tumultuous last term. From those
It’s hard to get lawyers and judges to agree on much these days, but here’s one exception: that Justice Elena Kagan is a terrific writer. Take her majority opinion in Allen v. Cooper. Kagan’s opening facts might already reel you in:
When Chief Justice John Roberts was a lawyer, he once wrote that determining the “best” available technology for controlling air pollution is like asking people to pick the “best” car: “Mario Andretti may select a Ferrari; a college student a Volkswagen beetle; a family of six a minivan. The choices
A good editor is like Pavlov’s dog. Here are five expressions that should make you salivate—for all the wrong reasons. 1. Regarding, Concerning You know you’re talking to a lawyer when you hear things like “Do you have any thoughts regarding where we should go for dinner?” or “I have a serious
Who doesn’t need some inspiration these days? On the writing front, consider Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Buck v. Davis. Here are 25 ways to write like him. Or do so automatically. A Sense of Time 1. Replace full dates with phrases. Two months later, Buck returned to federal court . . . Within
Good legal writers form coherent paragraphs. Great legal writers like Chief Justice Roberts do far more: 1) create a linear progression of paragraph openers, 2) add interim conclusions, 2) sprinkle in higher-level logical transitions, and 4) use echoing and dovetailing to help all the moving parts snap together. I’ve mapped
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