I’ve been discussing legal research and writing with a few different people lately; mostly chatting about the differences between UK law schools. Some require a legal research and writing course, but several do not. The University of Edinburgh, for example, just started offering, at least for the students in modules taught by the AHRC Centre, online materials on researching and writing.

At the postgraduate level it can be particularly difficult for students if a legal research and writing class isn’t offered, because I think that many of them can be blindsided by their first round of marks — not because they don’t know how to write but because they don’t know how to write in the field of law. Many postgrads either come from disciplines other than law, or didn’t do much writing during their first degree. Additionally, many of them come from overseas, and may be new to the common law system, new to English, or new to both.

The benefits of teaching legal researching and writing seem fairly obvious, so I won’t climb up on a soapbox or anything. Instead I thought I’d share some of the sites and blogs that I follow:

Legalwriting.net – Wayne Schiess’s blog on legal writing. I took his class on drafting at the University of Texas School of Law and it has probably been the single most useful class from my time there. I learned a great deal, and if you get the chance to hear him speak, I highly recommend it.

Legal Writing Prof Blog – On the Law Professor Blogs network, this blog (usually) contains snippets of interesting developments.

Information Overlord – Great all around blog covering general info management and law and tech issues.

Lo-Fi Librarian – All sorts of webby and bar related postings about the practice of law and of researching it.

Three legal writing books that I couldn’t live without:

A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage by Bryan Garner. Simply the best, and as an added bonus contains references for both UK and US usage. Garner’s work is really amazing, and he offers a daily email service called ‘Garner’s Usage tip of the Day‘.

The Redbook: A manual on legal style by Garner, Newman and Jackson. Again, really useful, especially as a quick reference. This one is geared more towards US style however.

The Economist Style Guide – Available both for free online and as an expanded book (I prefer the book), this guide is especially good at finding out all the little differences between UK and US English. It is also helpful when trying to write for an international audience.

There are certainly other resources that I use, especially in regards to books.  If anyone else has some suggestions for other blogs, please feel free to contact me.

This entry was posted Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 6:59 am and is filed under legal writing nerd. Both comments and pings are currently closed.