Customer Reviews

Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review, Second Edition (University Casebook Series)

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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 and pointless. John Yoo, your path to redemption is clear.

Last year I learned that Professor Eugene Volokh, a prolific and superb acamedician and author, had written a book with a blueprint for writing in law school and beyond. My expectation was that the book would be good, but I was awed by just how good it was. Prof. Volokh (pronounced "Volk" I am told) has done an enormous service for academics like myself who struggle to help students and young colleagues to learn the art of writing in the legal domain. That means papers for law school, articles for student publication, and beyond, when a person enters the profession and seeks to enhance his or her name. Now he has a second edition, adding two chaper: one on getting on to law review (a major benefit for law students), and the other advice on how to enter writing competitions.

Let me tell you how much I love this book. I bought ten copies of the first edition and distributed it to some of my students who I thought could benefit from it (although all can). My first choice to give one to was a protege of mine who was my research assistant, a moot court competitor (interscolastic), and a candidate for the law review board at the time. She advised me when I handed her the book, that it was required by all law review candidates--the board of editors run a program at my school and require the text.

Next, I have a colleague who had not been writiing. I gave a copy of the book to him and he seems to have moved on to produce a publishable piece. My wife, who went back to law school to get an LLM degree had to engage in some serious writing. I gave her a copy of the book and she got very high grades on her work and is considering turning one of them into an article.

So, when the new edition came out last week, I ordered 10 copies of it to spread the word again this year. I have been a professor of law for 37 years. I am thrilled that Professor Volokh saw fit to share his wisdom and insight into academic legal writing. Not since the original writing book that I learned from, Strunk and White's Elements of Style, has there been a book that I could recommend so heartily. If you are considering writing for law school or after, buy this book.

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.

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.

Volokh's book has many helpful tips about submitting articles to law journals. My co-author and I found the last portion of the book useful in timing our submissions. Also, the book was a great aide with how to negotiate with law reviews to get favorable terms, etc. As a side note, our paper was accepted by the UCLA Law Review and will be published in Feb. of 2005.

[Note: I wrote this review of the 1st Edition. It applies to the 2nd ed. too.]

This book is one of the most useful tools you can buy to help you succeed in law school. Sure, there are plenty of study guides and study aids out there for law school - teaching you the ins-and-outs of proximate causation, useless stuff like the meaning of "possibility of reverter," and how to say if a statement is hearsay. But success in law school involves much more than getting good grades in Contracts, Property, or Evidence. The key to distinguish yourself in law school (and immediately after) is your writing ability: Are you on law review? Have you written a note/article worthy of being published? Do you have a stellar writing sample for that clerkship application? Until this book, there was not a practical guide teaching academic legal writing. Every 1L should buy this book and read it before they attempt to take a seminar class or write a law review note. It will make a difference.

My only complaint about Prof. Volokh's book is that it was not available until my last year of law school. Had it been published earlier, its lessons would have drastically improved my seminar papers and law review note. But if you're like me and no longer in law school, still check this book out. It isn't solely for law students. It is an extremely useful guide for new attorneys who hope to write publishable articles after law school.

To borrow from the "give a man a fish...teach a man to fish" cliché (and thus horribly violate a lesson of Chapter 4), Prof. Volokh teaches law students and lawyers to "fish" by showing them how to write their own scholarly works.

Succinct, straightforward, info not available elsewhere (as easily), time-tested advice. Clearly worth having.

Professor Volokh's book has been invaluable to me as a writing guide. Relying on the guidance of this book, another student and I co-wrote a 2nd year independent study paper which received a high grade. Then we used his strategies to submit our work for publication offers--and received multiple offers! Prof. Volokh's tips and pointers are exactly the information no one else seems to teach you--particularly how to strategize sending out your work. Note that even his own writing style serves to inform readers what clear, concise, straightforward writing sounds like. It's not some airy-fairy, heavy treatise on what writing ought to be like with boring exercises--it's a compact, tight book on how to get it done efficiently and excellently. Best book purchase I've made in law school.

My law review assigned as required reading an essay that Professor Volokh later expanded on when he published this book. I benefited greatly by reading the essay as a law student, and I have again benefited by reading the book (first edition) as an attorney publishing in law reviews. The writing advice is superb, but what might get missed are helpful hints on how to publish in law reviews beyond your own, and how to publicize yourself afterward. All in all, it is a fantastic A-Z on how to engage in legal scholarship and make a name in doing so.

I highly recommend Professor Volokh's new book, Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers.

As the title suggests, it focuses primarily on legal writing, especially for aspiring and current law school students. However, anyone who wants to improve his/her writing and critical thinking skills should read this book. The book--which is only 189 pages--abounds in smart advice on how to write better and avoid common errors such as wordiness, unduly harsh criticism, overly technical language, etc.

Speaking as someone who starts law school in a month and a half, I am glad I read this book. It gave me a nice view about what type of writing is expected in law school. And unlike some academic books, it is affordable and highly readable.

Volokh addresses every possible question that a pre-law student could have about academic legal writing--how to choose a topic, how to test its claim or hypothesis, how to research it, how to use evidence (i.e., cases, law review articles, statistics, surveys, etc) correctly, and how even to publish and market your work.

To take one example: Volokh advises that in the process of conducting research always check the original source. In other words, do not simply assume that a secondary source will correctly represent the original article or case. For example, even the most revered Courts (such as the Supreme Court of the United States) sometimes misstate facts, arguments, and holdings in cases.

I can personally attest to the soundness of this advice. I once cited an article by a political science professor of mine in a paper I wrote for him. I relied on a secondary source to summarize his main thesis. When my professor graded the paper, he circled in red ink the citation of his work and wrote, This is not the argument I made. Did you bother to read the article?

Again, this is a great book for anyone considering law school. It should be on every pre-law student's must-read list.