Legal writing

Authority Legal writing places heavy reliance on authority. In most legal writing, the writer must back up assertions and statements with citations of authority. This is accomplished by a unique and complicated citation system, unlike that used in any other genre of writing. The standard methods for American legal citation are defined by two competing rule books: the ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation and The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Different methods may be used within the United States and in other nations. Precedent Legal writing values precedent, as distinct from authority. For example, a lawyer who must prepare a contract and who has prepared a similar contract before will often re-use, with limited changes, the old contract for the new occasion. Or a lawyer who has filed a successful motion to dismiss a lawsuit may use the same or a very similar form of motion again in another case, and so on. Many lawyers use and re-use written documents in this way and call these re-usable documents templates or, less commonly, forms. Vocabulary Legal writing extensively uses technical terminology that can be categorized in four ways: • Specialized words and phrases unique to law, e.g., tort, fee simple, and novation. • Ordinary words having different meanings in law, e.g., action (lawsuit), consideration (support for a promise), execute (to sign to effect), and party (a principal in a lawsuit). • Archaic vocabulary: legal writing employs many old words and phrases that were formerly quotidian language, but today exist mostly or only in law, dating from the 16th century; English examples are herein, hereto, hereby, heretofore, herewith, whereby, and wherefore (pronominal adverbs); said and such (as adjectives). ==Categories==

Legal writing is of two, broad categories: (i) legal analysis and (ii) legal drafting. Legal analysis is two-fold: (1) predictive analysis, and (2) persuasive analysis. In the United States, in most law schools students must learn legal writing; the courses focus on: (1) predictive analysis, i.e., an outcome-predicting memorandum (positive or negative) of a given action for the attorney's client; and (2) persuasive analysis, e.g., motions and briefs. Although not as widely taught in law schools, legal drafting courses exist; other types of legal writing concentrate upon writing appeals or on interdisciplinary aspects of persuasion. Predictive legal analysis The legal memorandum is the most common type of predictive legal analysis; it may include the client letter or legal opinion. The legal memorandum predicts the outcome of a legal question by analyzing the authorities governing the question and the relevant facts that gave rise to the legal question. It explains and applies the authorities in predicting an outcome, and ends with advice and recommendations. The legal memorandum also serves as record of the research done for a given legal question. Traditionally, and to meet the legal reader's expectations, it is formally organized and written. Persuasive legal analysis The persuasive document, a motion or a brief, attempts to persuade a deciding authority to favorably decide the dispute for the author's client. Motions and briefs are usually submitted to judges, but also to mediators, arbitrators, and others. In addition a persuasive letter may attempt to persuade the dispute's opposing party. Persuasive writing is the most rhetorically stylized. So although a brief states the legal issues, describes authorities, and applies authorities to the question—as does a memorandum—the brief's application portion is framed as an argument. The author argues for one approach to resolving the legal matter and does not present a neutral analysis. Legal drafting Legal drafting creates binding legal text. It includes enacted law like statutes, rule and regulations; contracts (private and public); personal legal documents like wills and trusts; and public legal documents like notices and instructions. Legal drafting requires no legal authority citation and generally is written without a stylized voice. ==Plagiarism==

In writing an objective analysis or a persuasive document, including a memorandum or brief, lawyers write under the same plagiarism rules applicable to most other writers, with additional ethical implications for presenting copied materials as original. Legal memoranda and briefs must properly attribute quotations and source authorities; yet, within a law office, a lawyer might borrow from other lawyers' texts without attribution, in using a well-phrased, successful argument made in a previous brief. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited in academic work, especially in law review articles, seminar papers, and similar writings intended to reflect the author's original thoughts. The drafting of legal documents such as contracts is different as, unlike in most other legal writing categories, it is common to use language and clauses that are derived from form books, legal opinions and other documents without attribution. Lawyers use forms documents when drafting documents such as contracts, wills, and judgments. The key difference between using phrases or paragraphs from other legal documents, and copying in other contexts or copying the entire document, arises from the fact that lawyers are effectively drawing upon a common pool of clauses that they adjust and modify for their own purposes. == Plain language movement ==

The Plain Language Movement in legal writing involves an effort to avoid complex language and terminology in legal documents, to make legal writing more understandable and accessible. One of the goals of the movement is to reduce reliance on terms of art, words that have a specific meaning within the context of the law, but that may carry a different meaning in other contexts. Legalese Legalese is an English term first used in 1914 for "legal writing that is very difficult for laymen to read and understand, the implication being that this abstruseness is deliberate for excluding the legally untrained and to justify high fees." Legalese, as a term, has been adopted in other languages. Legalese is characterized by long sentences, many modifying clauses, complex vocabulary, high abstraction, and insensitivity to the layman's need to understand the document's gist. Legalese arises most commonly in legal drafting, yet appears in both types of legal analysis. Legalese suffers from being less comprehensible to the general public than plain English, which can be important in both private (e.g., contracts) and public matters (e.g., laws, especially in democracies where the populace is seen as both responsible for and subject to the laws). == See also ==