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Writing is Writing
By Elizabeth Vaughan | August 11, 2008
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia proclaimed yesterday “I do not believe that legal writing exists.” A curious statement, considering he was accepting a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Legal Writers. Perhaps they should change their name. Seriously, though, I couldn’t agree more. Justice Scalia went on to say,
That is to say, I do not believe it exists as a separate genre of writing. Rather, I think legal writing belongs to that large, undifferentiated, unglamorous category of writing known as nonfiction prose. Someone who is a good legal writer would, but for the need to master a different substantive subject, be an equivalently good writer of history, economics or, indeed, theology.
Justice Scalia’s remarks raise an interesting question: What is it that makes lawyers think that legal writing is different? While legal writing does have a few small differences, such as the need to cite authority, these features don’t account for the florid and opaque style that many lawyers use. Instead, I suspect that the cumbersome style often found in legal writing is a result of the writer trying to “sound like a lawyer” by using, for example, passive verbs, outdated language, and lots and lots of latin. Isn’t that the way to convince the court that you are clever and serious?
If you won’t take it from me, you now have it on the authority of a Supreme Court Justice: Good writing is good writing, whether it appears in a scholarly journal, a business memorandum, or (yes!) even a court of law.
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