Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2011
Abstract
Despite some imperfections across disciplines, advice from well-known fiction and non-fiction writers can serve lawyers and judges well because law, in its essence, is a literary profession heavily dependent on the written word. There are only two types of writing - good writing and bad writing. As poet (and Massachusetts Bar member) Archibald MacLeish recognized, good legal writing is simply good writing about a legal subject. "Lawyers would be better off," said MacLeish, "if they stopped thinking of the language of the law as a different language and realized that the art of writing for legal purposes is in no way distinguishable from the art of writing for any other purpose."
Recommended Citation
Douglas E. Abrams,
What Great Writers Can Teach Lawyers and Judges: Precise, Concise, Simple and Clear, 52 New Hampshire Bar Journal 6
(2011).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/facpubs/911