Lawmakers should work toward adopting strong, standardized language in criminal statutes

American criminal statutes, both state and federal, use various wordings to prohibit certain conduct and to impose punishments. It is therefore natural for the legislative drafter to be concerned with knowing what the prevailing methods are, and which ones might be best. If a standard is possible, using it consistently…

Jul 1, 2015 6:10 AM CDT

NYC lawyer turns to zombies, werewolves and cocker spaniels for his books about case law

Jul 1, 2015 4:00 AM CDT

Savvy trial lawyers create sensory experiences to help jurors perceive witnesses’ stories

Last summer I attended an intensive, weeklong postgraduate writing workshop at Vermont College for Fine Arts given by the novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog and Townie). Not surprisingly, of the six participants I was the only lawyer. We met daily to discuss our writing.…

Jun 1, 2015 6:00 AM CDT

June is busting out all over with big-time SCOTUS decisions

U.S. Supreme Court terms have ended with a bang in recent years. In 2012, a last-day-of-the-term decision upheld most of the Affordable Care Act. In 2013, the justices struck down a key provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act on their final day. And last June, the court held…

Jun 1, 2015 5:35 AM CDT

New ABA annotation may help courts and lawyers navigate attorney sanction process

Jun 1, 2015 3:20 AM CDT

Help decide the winner of the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction

The ABA Journal and the University of Alabama School of Law are proud to announce the finalists for the fifth annual Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. The books picked as this year’s finalists are My Sister’s Grave, by Robert Dugoni; Terminal City, by Linda Fairstein; and The Secret of…

May 14, 2015 2:00 PM CDT

First impressions endure, even in brief writing

We have a long history of judges saying that (1) little errors in a brief betoken bigger mistakes, (2) less is more, and (3) good briefs demand little physical or mental effort from the reader. Even so, briefs in most courts are astonishingly ill-proofread, they are rarely tight, and lawyers…

May 1, 2015 6:45 AM CDT

Grammar nerds, meet your ‘Comma Queen’ (podcast)

Related links: The New Yorker: “Mary Norris: Comma Queen” (video series) Slate: “The Corrections: A delightful memoir by a New Yorker copy editor” New York Times: “‘Between You & Me,’ by Mary Norris” NPR: “The Comma Queen Will See You, Now”

Apr 30, 2015 4:20 PM CDT

Are legalistic labels a bad habit or a necessity?

Sometimes you'll study a point of technique, experiment some, steep yourself in the literature relating to it, experiment some more, and finally arrive at a strong conviction about what's almost invariably the best approach—often with the help of teachers. I once did that with the golf grip, and I had…

Apr 1, 2015 6:06 AM CDT

What are your go-to grammar guides?

Lawyers tend to care very deeply about language. Arguments frequently develop in our comments sections over punctuation, capitalization and grammar. ABA Journal columnist Bryan A. Garner once devoted an entire column to the word “shall.” And our own readers are not alone in their fervor. The battles over what constitutes…

Mar 11, 2015 3:15 PM CDT

A new defense approach to storytelling changes capital cases in Texas

"The first time he murdered was to get a car," Jill Patterson says, "and the second time he murdered was also to get a car. "At age 6 his mother didn't have a car, and they were doing illegal things in the house. So when he was 6 she said…

Mar 1, 2015 6:12 AM CST

Harper Lee will release sequel to ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

Legendary author Harper Lee, whose only published novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic in both general and legal genres, is finally coming out with another book 55 years later, the Associated Press and New York Times report. The new work, Go Set a Watchman, will be released July…

Feb 3, 2015 12:15 PM CST

Going beyond the evidence to spin a story for your jury

Trial storytelling is often highly creative and innovative. It is filled with aesthetic danger and strategic risk-taking—as are all forms of narrative art. But there is far more at stake for legal storytellers.

Feb 1, 2015 6:21 AM CST

Legal minds differ on whether The Bluebook is subject to copyright protection

Feb 1, 2015 3:40 AM CST

New project rewrites SCOTUS opinions from a feminist perspective

Feb 1, 2015 3:30 AM CST