Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, guest blogger Ross
Guberman has been authoring some very interesting posts about legal
writing. Guberman’s earlier posts
highlighted his picks for the top writers on the Supreme Court, with Roberts as his pick for the conservatives and Kagan as his pick for the liberals.
I found Guberman’s post from today to be
especially helpful. Guberman describes
several steps that attorneys can follow to make their trial filings more
readable, compelling, and memorable. While
Guberman’s focus in this post is on filings before trial courts, the lessons
here for the most part seem applicable to appellate brief writing – and those
pieces of advice that conflict with appellate formatting are at least based on writing
themes that apply to all levels of legal advocacy.
I found the last point on parentheticals to be
the most helpful piece of advice.
Guberman notes the importance of maintaining a consistent approach to
your parentheticals and offers the following good example from a brief by
Morgan Chu:
Defendants should not be heard to complain that they did
not have Alpha Holdings’ documents prior to Mr. Gordon’s deposition when
Defendants did not even subpoena Alpha Holdings for documents until after
Mr. Gordon’s deposition. See E.E.O.C. v. Honda of America Mfg., Inc.,
2008 WL 440437 at *6–7 (S.D. Ohio February 13, 2008) (refusing
to permit the re-deposition of a witness because the deposing
party failed to pursue obvious avenues for discovering documents before taking
the deposition).
All too often I find myself inserting the
redundant term “holding” or oversummarizing the cited case. Adopting a uniform strategy, especially one
modeled on this example, helps avoid these problems. This is especially helpful when space
constraints require one to choose parenthetical citations over drawn-out
analogies.
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