the (new) legal writer

Before you attempt to write it ...

... consider this quotation by Albert Einstein:

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

The danger of over-quoting.

Merely stringing together quotations from legal authorities is not argument and is not an effective way to persuade anyone. This old lesson was recently repeated by Judge Posner in a recent decision in an immigration appeal. For details, read this post on my Louisiana Civil Appeals blog. (And you irony spotters out there, please forgive the post’s long quotation.)

Two good-looking legal-writing blogs

Two recent additions to my legal-writing blogroll:

• Lady (Legal) Writer, by Megan Boyd. Megan’s blog recently made the ABA Journal’s Top 100 Blawg list. It’s great to see a legal-writing blog make the list, and Megan’s blog is worthy of the honor. (And of course, we here at The (New) Legal Writer approve the parentheses in the blog title!)
• R+W Legal Consultants offers research and writing tools for today’s litigators. The proprietor is Eric Voigt, author of a recent article on effective use of parentheticals in legal citations, discussed in this post.

I ain’t got nobody.

Daily Writing Tips has this useful post on avoiding double-negatives. I share it for two reasons. One is that, for writing in English, the lesson is sound. The other is that it’s a good excuse to post this number by Louis Prima.