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Legal Writing Editor — Page 5 of 12 —
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Toothless Plain-Language Laws Do No Good

Policymakers like to talk about protecting the public from unscrupulous characters who peddle contracts of adhesion loaded with convoluted legal language.

But if a law that requires plain language in consumer contracts contains too many exceptions and limitations, it can end up having little or no effect.

In Minnesota, the legislature doubtless intended the Plain Language Contract Act to help consumers understand the contracts they enter into with sophisticated parties.

But over the last 30 years, there’s no evidence that the statute has had any effect on the contents of most consumer contracts. Indeed, the statute is example of how well-intentioned plain-language laws do no good if they don’t have teeth. Read More

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A Case Study in Governmentese—Guns, NBC, and the D.C. Police

gunsI’ve written here and at Lawyerist about why it’s important for lawyers to write simply, clearly, and directly.

But lawyers aren’t the only supposedly professional writers who prefer obscure, passive prose to simple, active prose.

Too often, for example, government officials suffer from their own unique -ese: governmentese (a/k/a officialese). Read More

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Have Judges Finally Had Enough of Verbosity?

With thoughtful, careful revising, and a little humility, lawyers can cut pages of verbosity and fluff from their legal briefs. Judges have always known that, and have always told lawyers to do it. Yet lawyers, self-righteous and self-indulgent to a tee, don’t listen.

It seems, though, that at least one federal judge has had enough.

In August, U.S. District Court Judge Steven D. Merryday denied a party’s request for leave to file a motion that exceeded the court’s 25-page limit.

Annoyed that he had to even consider the request, Judge Merryday revised part of what the lawyers proposed to file to show why the lawyers didn’t need the extra pages

As the Legal Writing Prof Blog points out:

By eliminating “redundancy, verbosity, and legalism,” the judge reduced one of the lawyer’s passages from approximately 125 words to 47 words. He then suggested that the lawyer apply the same technique to comply with the page limit.

Here’s Judge Merryday’s order denying the motion and citing Bryan Garner’s The Elements of Legal Style as his authority.

Will this begin a trend? Sometimes public shame is a powerful motivator.

(photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mythoto/5067114440/)

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