The Law, the Lawyers, and the Writers

The great writers have one thing in common-they castigate the human race, including themselves, the frailties of mankind, and his noble institutions. Law and the lawyers have suffered at the hands of the writers. The doctors have suffered even more. Most rulers, if they lived long enough, have been the subject of satire, caricatures, exposure, or castigation. The church and churchmen have also suffered. The principal subject matter of satire over the centuries has been the Church. ... Because of this general emphasis on soiled humanity, the legal profession need not feel alone as it finds itself the subject matter of the great writers over many centuries

What Great Writers Can Teach Lawyers and Judges: Precise, Concise, Simple and Clear

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

Backstage At The Theater Workshop

Sophocles... Euripedes... Shakespeare... Beaumont... DeVega... Moliere... Tolstoy. The novice stares at the names of these and many other great writers as she looks up and around the Iowa State College Theater Workshop that was once a pavilion for animal judging. Its uniqueness is startling

Toward a Writing-Centered Legal Education

The future of legal education—and experiential learning—should be grounded in a curriculum that requires students to take writing courses throughout law school. Additionally, the curriculum should be one that collapses the distinction between doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical faculty, as well as merges analytical, practical, and clinical instruction into a real world curriculum. The justification for a writing-intensive program of legal education is driven by the reality that persuasive writing ability is among the most important skills a lawyer must possess and a skill that many lawyers and judges claim graduates lack. Part of the problem is that law schools dedicate fewer than six credits to required legal writing courses and treat legal writing faculty as if they were second-class citizens. That should stop now. In making legal education more writing-centered, law schools can help struggling students to become competent writers, cultivate an educational environment in which good writers can become great writers, and bridge the divide between legal education and law practice

Applying the ‘Write Short’ Concept in a University Degree Assessment Strategy

It is a remark credited to several great writers: the admission, ‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you this long one instead’. Spilling your guts is easy; being concise takes time. Short is harder; content-rich, succinct writing requires supreme skill and considered application. This short paper argues the case that small is beautiful when we think about setting university assignment word counts

Whitman and Nietzsche

This volume will be a great aid to students and scholars alike in American literature, American thought, the history of ideas, and comparative literature. Stavrou draws from the entire bodies of work by Whitman and Nietzsche to explore the parallels in the authors' conceptions of paradox, the totality of life, and solitude among other themes in this exploration of the underlying philosophical similarities of these two great writers of the nineteenth century