Legalistic Regimentation

I have bucked like a wild stallion against the bridle my legal writing professors wanted to affix upon my head, and my grades reflect this. Damn their structure, damn their eyes. Legal writing’s ultimate goal is to produce a clear and concise document, one which states the information a judge or justice would require to render a decision. Legal writing succeeds, though with a caveat: once you’ve been trained in the Esquires arcane ways, only then will you be able to read one of these documents with velocity and comprehension.

There is a new trend in legal authorship to strive for clarity over “hithertofores,” “henceforths,” “wherewithals,” and other strangulating terms. However, this trend fights the old school, those entrenched lawyers trained to construct ponderous sentences using dense language. No one knows which side will have its day. However, consider that a clear document can be understood by anyone with a passable educational history, while an incomprehensible document requires, and deserves, a lawyer trained to muddle through the verbose morass. By its very nature, legal writing eliminates much of the populace from reading it, much less enjoying it.

Legal writing is also highly structured. Introduction, where you introduce the work. Roadmap, which walks the reader through the main points you will address within the work. The body, each section dedicated to one of the main points you addressed in the roadmap. Conclusion, a summation of the main points addressed in the body. Bam, bam, bam. You are done. While this makes a document easy to search through, it also leaches a document of imagination. Though the arguments within the paper might be clever, they will generally follow the same structure. You will state your conclusion, state the applicable rule/law/statute, analyze and apple the rule/law/statute to the situation at hand, and restate the conclusion. Again, great for when you need to find information, hell on creativity.

You want to know everything up front. I don’t. I want to leave something for the reader to discover. I want to engage the reader, not spoonfeed them rotten applesauce. For them, the judge or justice has neither time nor patience, and wants information now. There is a good possibility the judge or justice may not even read the entire document, choosing instead to flip to a certain section, read a page or two, then move on. Though no one will admit it, I’m sure some of these readers don’t bother to even read some of the briefs that cross their desk, having made their minds up beforehand, only requiring the briefs for form’s sake.

For me, I hope my audience, the leisure reader, wants to have a little fun. Someday, I hope they’ll pick up my book and read it because they heard it was a good read, and will remove them from this world for a little while. I hope they’ll reread certain sections because I shocked them, or because of a deft twist of phrase, or just because they want to reread it. I hope they never even think of me, because the world I crafted was so real, to them, I don’t exist, only the world does. And if I should write starting at the end and work backwards, or if I should desire the book printed half upside-down, or if I choose to publish in binary characters, I hope they would appreciate the decision to deviate from the main road, as long as it makes sense (I would never publish in binary until our new robotic overlords overthrow the government).