Point Taken: How to Write Like the World's Best Judges *Book
In Point Taken, Ross Guberman delves into the work of the best judicial opinion-writers and offers a step-by-step method based on practical and provocative examples. Featuring numerous cases and opinions from 34 esteemed judges - from Learned Hand to Antonin Scalia - Point Taken, explores what it takes to turn "great judicial writing" into "great writing". Guberman provides a system for crafting effective and efficient openings to set the stage, covering the pros and cons of whether to resolve legal issues up front and whether to sacrifice taut syllogistic openings in the name of richness and nuance. Guberman offers strategies for pruning clutter, adding background, emphasizing key points, adopting a narrative voice, and guiding the reader through visual cues. The structure and flow of the legal analysis is targeted through a host of techniques for organizing the discussion at the macro level, using headings, marshaling authorities, including or avoiding footnotes, and finessing transitions. Guberman shares his style "Must Haves", a bounty of edits at the word and sentence level that add punch and interest, and that make opinions more vivid, varied, confident, and enjoyable. He also outlines his style "Nice to Haves", metaphors, similes, examples, analogies, allusions, and rhetorical figures. Finally, he addresses the thorny problem of dissents, extracting the best practices for dissents based on facts, doctrine, or policy. The appendix provides a helpful checklist of practice pointers along with biographies of the 34 featured judges. Read more
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Why Must Read Point Taken: How to Write Like the World's Best Judges?
‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse’ is a well-known phrase. Judges are responsible when the law is badly expressed in their judgments. Furthermore, it is a joy to read good writing, not just novels and essays, but judgments as well – after all, every court case is itself a story. The rules (and their exceptions) are not much different from the rules of good writing generally, but a judgment of a court has specific objectives. It determines the rights of the parties and lays down the orders that they have to obey. To achieve this, the judgment and orders must not only be reasonable and right, they have to be clear. Secondly, the judgment ought to explain why the judge ruled as he did. To do this, the facts must be set out and the dispute clearly enunciated. Guberman’s book helps judges perform this basic task with effective advice and some fine examples. If judges read this book and can discipline themselves to follow it recommends, there will be few badly written judgments. A judgment must not only be right; it must read right.
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