Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers

by Eugene Volokh

Book Overview

Designed to help law students write and publish articles, this text provides detailed instructions for every aspect of the law school writing, research, and publication process. Topics covered include... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1587784777
• ISBN13: 9781587784774
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Foundation Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Pragmatic, clear, systematic, and without equal

Former clerk to the Supreme Court and Professor at UCLA Eugene Volokh has given a remarkable gift to the legal community that would be a bargain at twice the price. It delivers pragmatic and thoughtful advice in a remarkably clear and lucid style. Moreover, it is not simply clear for law books--frankly, a low bar to pass--Volokh writes for the ordinary public daily on his eponymous blog (where you can read the first chapter of this book), and the skills required for that task manifest themselves in this work. Academic Legal Writing is also extremely systematic. Every aspect of the paper is taken into consideration, from the approach to research, to avoiding off-putting humor or politically charged language, time tables for submissions, and so on, even including how to draft letters to professors and law reviews asking them to look over your work and to consider it for publication. Academic Legal Writing is really in a class by itself. That said, perhaps I can indicate its greatness by invoking a few other names. Academic Legal Writing is a perfect companion volume to Bryan Gardner's The Elements of Legal Style. It is as clear and concise and accessible as Marvin Chirelstein's Concepts and Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts, and it deserves to be as ubiquitous and is certainly as valuable, thoughtful, and comprehensive as Joseph Glannon's E & E Civil Procedure and Erwin Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies. If you know these books, you should be going "wow." If you don't, and you are going to law school, I advise reading all of them. (Also Getting to Maybe, which I never found compelling, but am in the distinct minority view on.) I read Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk's Scholarly Writing for Law Students, which is also good and which Volokh recommends. Academic Legal Writing appears to be a very conscious next step beyond that book. In a perfect world, buying and reading both would be advisable. In the real world, I read Scholarly Writing once, Academic Legal Writing many, many times. Academic Legal Writing is your desert island pick. Please do yourself a favor and read this book. If you don't, you will simply be doing all of your competitors a likely unrequited kindness. One final note: Professor Volokh is a conservative of the thoughtful and sober variety. I am a liberal of the sort who avidly studies the Endangered Species List to see if "Thoughtful Conservatives" have been listed yet. This is not an issue: Professor Volokh's political beliefs are discernible in this book only by the most careful parsing: in some of his examples, he points out the misleading use of statistics in gun violence, an academic preoccupation of his. You could then do the math and figure out that he has at least one conservative leaning. Otherwise, his politics would be utterly inscrutable. And, frankly, this book would be on my bookshelf even if Professor Volokh had say, written a memo arguing that the Geneva Conventions were outdated an

Pragmatic, clear, systematic, and without equal

Former clerk to the Supreme Court and Professor at UCLA Eugene Volokh has given a remarkable gift to the legal community that would be a bargain at twice the price. It delivers pragmatic and thoughtful advice in a remarkably clear and lucid style. Moreover, it is not simply clear for law books--frankly, a low bar to pass--Volokh writes for the ordinary public daily on his eponymous blog (where you can read the first chapter of this book), and the skills required for that task manifest themselves in this work. Academic Legal Writing is also extremely systematic. Every aspect of the paper is taken into consideration, from the approach to research, to avoiding off-putting humor or politically charged language, time tables for submissions, and so on, even including how to draft letters to professors and law reviews asking them to look over your work and to consider it for publication. Academic Legal Writing is really in a class by itself. That said, perhaps I can indicate its greatness by invoking a few other names. Academic Legal Writing is a perfect companion volume to Bryan Gardner's The Elements of Legal Style. It is as clear and concise and accessible as Marvin Chirelstein's Concepts and Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts, and it deserves to be as ubiquitous and is certainly as valuable, thoughtful, and comprehensive as Joseph Glannon's E & E Civil Procedure and Erwin Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies. If you know these books, you should be going "wow." If you don't, and you are going to law school, I advise reading all of them. (Also Getting to Maybe, which I never found compelling, but am in the distinct minority view on.) I read Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk's Scholarly Writing for Law Students, which is also good and which Volokh recommends. Academic Legal Writing appears to be a very conscious next step beyond that book. In a perfect world, buying and reading both would be advisable. In the real world, I read Scholarly Writing once, Academic Legal Writing many, many times. Academic Legal Writing is your desert island pick. Please do yourself a favor and read this book. If you don't, you will simply be doing all of your competitors a likely unrequited kindness. One final note: Professor Volokh is a conservative of the thoughtful and sober variety. I am a liberal of the sort who avidly studies the Endangered Species List to see if "Thoughtful Conservatives" have been listed yet. This is not an issue: Professor Volokh's political beliefs are discernible in this book only by the most careful parsing: in some of his examples, he points out the misleading use of statistics in gun violence, an academic preoccupation of his. You could then do the math and figure out that he has at least one conservative leaning. Otherwise, his politics would be utterly inscrutable. And, frankly, this book would be on my bookshelf even if Professor Volokh had say, written a memo arguing that the Geneva Conventions were outdated a

Used Academic Legal Writing to earn Great Grade

I didn't participate in law review or any other extracurricular activities. Since I didn't want to work for a big firm or a judge, I figured my time would be more rationally allocated by reading books on trial and appellate advocacy. I've read most of F. Lee Bailey's books on how to investigate and try various cases, I've attended several trial skills CLEs, and I've studied the closing arguments of the greats. I've also read just about everything by Bryan A. Garner. Thus, going into my last semester of law school, I knew a lot about persuasive and analytical writing, but almost nothing about scholarly writing. I had avoided "paper classes." Unfortunately, my desire to take a certain class was outweighed by my aversion to academic writing: I was in a class where the entire grade would be based on one paper. Thus, I turned to Volokh's Academic Legal Writing. The date my paper was due severe formatting glitches caused me to lose 4 - 5 pages of text - the guts of one of my "Roman numeral" arguments. I spend several hours fixing the formatting that could have been spent doing final polishing. Although able to fix the footnotes, I never recovered that lost text. Nevertheless, I earned the second-highest grade, missing the top score by only 2 points. In earning this grade I bested several law review editors, and many of the top 10 students. Had I not read and employed the principles in Academic Legal Writing, I am confident I would not have done so well. One principle I learned was to demonstrate to the reader early in the paper why the paper is necessary. The best way to do this is to show that your paper picks up where another article left off, or that your paper covers an issue previously ignored. Thus, I began: "Although the federal bribery statute's scope is sweeping, covering conduct well beyond the "the most blatant and specific attempts of those with money to influence governmental action," it has been given scant attention. Legal scholars and political scientists are, in Professor Lowenstein's words, guilty of "sins of omission" for ignoring bribery. Little has changed since Professor Lowenstein's 1985 article. Thus, this Article seeks to fill one of the many gaps." To those of you familiar with scholarly writing, making this point would seem obvious. But it was not obvious to me. Volokh's book taught me many things I did not know, and I suspect even experienced writers will learn something worth the investment of time and money in his book. It's also likely that those of you fluent with academic legal writing learned things piecemeal. Volokh's work is systematic: You will fill in gaps of our own knowledge. Go buy a book here.

Sin Qua Non

It would be foolish to attempt the daunting and complex feat of writing a publishable law review article without frequent reference to Professor Volokh's excellent book. Unlike many how-to books in any field, Academic Legal Writing doesn't waste time recycling conventional wisdom or dabbling too much in abstract talk of standards. It is full of fresh insights and eminently practical advice about the whole process of academic legal writing, from thesis selection to publication. An under-praised but no less valuable advantage of Volokh's book is that it channels a genuine enthusiasm for legal scholarship that I found completely contagious. Writing a law review article is a grueling, difficult, and sometimes tedious process. I can be sure that the quality of my article improved drastically simply because Academic Legal Writing kept me motivated by holding up the image of a superb article and its value to the writer and to the scholarly community. This book should be required reading for every member of the nation's law reviews, and if I felt uppity enough, I might even recommend it to my law professors.

Volokh is a Genius

Eugene Volokh is a genius--well, maybe not a genius--almost nobody is a genius--but he's pretty darn smart.