Scholarly writing for law students

This book fills an important niche in legal-writing literature by teaching law students how to write scholarly papers for seminars, law reviews, and law-review competitions and how to have their work recognized. It helps novices and more experienced scholars alike to write papers with a minimum of anxiety and a maximum of creativity. Employing a process theory of writing, the text first describes the enterprise of scholarly writing and then discusses techniques for brainstorming topics and theses, researching, drafting, and revising for substance and style. It covers both traditional doctrinal topics and newer areas like empirical studies. There are also chapters on footnotes, avoiding plagiarism, law review practice, and dissemination of student work through publication and submission to national writing competitions. Appendices provide a sample law-review competition paper, answers to in-text exercises, sample syllabi for scholarly writing courses, and a rubric for evaluating and editing scholarly papers and articles.*

Contents

• Introduction: Scholarly writing in law school

• Exploration : choosing and narrowing a topic

• Inspiration : finding and developing a thesis

• The mostly research stage

• The writing process : getting it down on paper

• The writing process : revising and polishing

• Footnotes and the ethical use of borrowed materials

• Writing with care

• Writing with style

• The law review process : evaluating and editing the work of others

• Getting mileage : winning awards, publishing your work, and joining the conversation

• Appendix A. Sample casenote/competition paper

• Appendix B. Answers to exercises

• Appendix C. Scholarly writing workshops and courses

• Appendix D. Seminar paper rubric