Hyland A Defense of Legal Writing

A defense of legal writing
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ESSAY
A DEFENSE OF LEGAL WRITING

Richard HylandI*
Legal writing is on the run. Lawyers have long attempted, without

much success, to reform it.*1 And now that scholars too have discovered
that lawyers write badly,2 and scientists have proven that most people
t Lawyer, Covington & Burling. A.B. 1970, Harvard University; J.D. 1980, Uni
versity of California, Berkeley; D.E.A. 1982, University of Paris 2. I would like to
thank Klaus Burmeister, Reed Dickerson, Willy Fletcher, Oscar Garibaldi, Tim Hes
ter, William Logan, David Remes, Simon Schneebalg, and Jim Snipes for their percep
tive suggestions, not all of which I was wise enough to accept. I would also like to
thank Mary Keene for her research assistance.
1 See, e.g., Beardsley, Beware of, Eschew and Avoid Pompous Prolixity and Plat
itudinous Epistles!, 16 Cal. St. B.J. 65 (1941); Beardsley, Wherein and Whereby
Beardsley Makes Reply to Challenge, 16 Cal. St. B.J. 106 (1941); Bowman, Are
Lawyers Lousy Writers?, 6 Ga. St. B.J. 285 (1970); Dick, Legal Language, 2 Can.
B.J. 204 (1959); Gerhart, Improving Our Legal Writing: Maxims from the Masters,
40 A.B.A. J. 1057 (1954); Kanter, Effective Legal Writing—Some Thoughts and Re
flections on Learning and Teaching, 42 Chi. B. Rec. 112 (1960); Kellog, A Plan for
Drafting in Plain English, 56 Cal. St. B.J. 154 (1981); Rossman, The Lawyers'
English, 48 A.B.A. J. 50 (1962); see also Lavery, The Language of the Law (pts. 1 &
2), 7 A.B.A. J. 277 (1921), 8 A.B.A. J. 269 (1922); O’Hayre, A Look at Gobbledygook,
8 L. Off. Econ. &. Mgmt. 97 (1967); Writing It Right: A Symposium, 15 Prac.
Law. 33 (1969).
2 See, e.g., R. Flesch, How to Write Plain English (1979); R. Goldfarb
& J. Raymond, Clear Understandings: A Guide to Legal Writing at x-xi
(1982); D. Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law 24-29 (1963) [hereinafter
cited as D. Mellinkoff, Language]; D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing: Sense &
Nonsense at xi-xiii (1982) [hereinafter cited as D. Meixinkoff, Legal Writing];
Hager, Let’s Simplify Legal Language, 32 Rocky Mtn. L. Rev. 74 (1959); Lind-
gren, Style Matters: A Review Essay on Legal Writing, 92 Yale L.J. 161 (1982);
Raymond, Legal Writing: An Obstruction to Justice, 30 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (1978); Stark,
Why Lawyers Can’t Write, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 1389 (1984); Wydick, Plain English for
Lawyers, 66 Calif. L. Rev. 727 (1978); see also G. Block, Effective Legal Writ
ing (2d ed. 1983); R. Dickerson, The Fundamentals of Legal Drafting
(1965); G. Gopen, Writing from a Legal Perspective (1981); L. Squires & M.
Rombauer, Legal Writing in a Nutshell (1982); H. Weihofen, Legal Writ
ing Style (2d ed. 1980); Danet, Language in the Legal Process, 14 Law & Soc’y
Rev. 445, 464-69, 540-41 (1980); Gottlieb, Teaching English in a Law School, 49
A.B.A. J. 666 (1963). See generally Collins & Hattenhauer, Law and Language: A
Selected, annotated Bibliography on Legal Writing, 33 J. Legal Educ. 141 (1983).
For the critique from the previous generation, see F. Rodell, Woe Unto You, Law
yers! (2d ed. 1957); Rodell, Goodbye to Law Reviews, 23 Va. L. Rev. 38 (1936)
[hereinafter cited as Rodell, Goodbye}. See also Rodell, Goodbye to Law Re
views—Revisited, 48 Va. L. Rev. 279 (1962).
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600 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 134:599
do not understand what lawyers write,3 several jurisdictions have pro

hibited traditional legal writing by statute.4 In fact, few can be found to
defend it.5 Legal writing is one of those rare creatures, like the rat and
the cockroach, that would attract little sympathy even as an endangered
species.6
This Essay examines the premises underlying the view that law
yers cannot write and the solutions that have been proposed to solve the
problem. It also offers an alternative remedy based on a different con
ception of the law. I begin by reviewing what the critics dislike about
the way lawyers write, the explanations they have offered for why law
yers write as they do, and an idea implicit in their suggestions for im
provement: namely that lawyers should write like novelists. Though I
believe that lawyers often do not write well, I conclude that the com
mon diagnosis and purported cure are really further symptoms of the
disease. I then attempt to distinguish between the language of the law
and the language of literature. I suggest that legal writing can be im
proved only by an increased awareness of the conceptual structure of
the law. Finally, I explain why I believe that the quality of legal writ
ing will probably not improve.
At the outset, there is a definitional problem. If the term “legal
writing” is meant to encompass everything lawyers write,7 it seems to
define a category too heterogeneous to merit uniform treatment. Very
few meaningful propositions would apply equally to appellate briefs,
judicial opinions, law-review articles, letters to clients, memoranda to
partners, contracts, wills, statutes, and regulations. Behind much of
3 See, e.g., A. Elwork, B. Sales & J. Alfini, Making Jury Instructions

Understandable 12-17 (1982); Charrow & Charrow, Making Legal Language Un
derstandable: A Psycholinguistic Study ofJury Instructions, 79 Colum. L. Rev. 1306
(1979); Elwork, Sales & Alfini, Junkie Decisions: In Ignorance of the Law or in Light
of It, 1 Law & Hum. Behav. 163 (1977); Sales, Elwork & Alfini, Improving Compre
hension for Jury Instructions, in The Criminal Justice System 23 (B. Sales ed.
1977).
* For statutes requiring the use of plain language in contracts, see, for example,
Conn. Gen. Stat. Ann. §§ 38-68s to 38-68x, 42-152 to 42-158 (West Supp. 1985);
Minn. Stat. §§ 325G.29-.36 (1982); NJ. Stat. Ann. § 56:12-2 (West Supp. 1985);
N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-702(a) (McKinney Supp. 1984-1985); see also D. Mel
linkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 205-18 (reviewing the statutory material).
6 The defenses include Aiken, Let's Not Oversimplify Legal Language, 32 Rocky
Mtn. L. Rev. 358 (1960); Friedman, Law and its Language, 33 Geo. Wash. L.
Rev. 563 (1964); Morton, Challenge Made to Beardsley’s Plea For Plain and Simple
Legal Syntax, 16 Cal. St. B.J. 103 (1941); Steuer, Legal Vocabulary—Its Uses and
Limitations, 15 Prac. Law. 39 (1969).
6 “[T]oo much of the language of the law is anachronism, a deservedly endan
gered species, that needs only a little help to become what befits it—extinct.” D. Mel
linkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 106.
7 "The language of the law ... is the customary language used by law
yers . . . .” D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra note 2, at 3.

1986] LEGAL WRITING 601
what the critics write, however, lies the view that there should be a
unifying theme to all varieties of legal writing: the law should be writ
ten for the people, for those whose obligations the writing governs.
Lawyers, in other words, should write so that non-lawyers can under
stand them.8 The proposition may seem so innocent that no one could
object to it. Yet I believe that lawyers must obey a different principle
when they write: they must write neither for non-lawyers nor even
merely for each other; rather, they must write to meet the demands of
conceptual thought. One of the objectives of this Essay is to explain this
alternative view.
The critics have compiled a catalogue of the problems with legal
writing. They object to archaic lawyerly terms such as “hereinbefore,”
“notwithstanding,” and “arguendo,”9 legal doublets such as “null and
void” and “cease and desist,”10 compound prepositions like “in the
event that” and “with reference to,”11 general verbosity,12 13 multiple
negatives,12 frequent qualification and exception,14 the corruption of
common words by assigning to them purely legal meanings,15 dangling
modifiers,16 long strings of nouns,17 poor punctuation,18 “convoluted
8 Yet why—if you think it over for a minute—should people not be privi
leged to understand completely and precisely any written laws that di
rectly concern them, any business documents they have to sign, any code of
rules and restrictions which applies to them and under which they perpet
ually live?
F. Rodell, supra note 2, at 126.
9 See R. Dickerson, supra note 2, at 125; R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 33; R.
Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 3,136; G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 123
24; D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 2-9; L. Squires & M. Rom
bauer, supra note 2, at 103; Danet, supra note 2, at 476-77; Hager, supra note 2, at
78; Wydick, supra note 2, at 728, 739-40.
10 See G. Block, supra note 2, at 39; R. Dickerson, supra note 2, at 50-51,
125-26; R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 40; G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 16-17; D. Mel
linkoff, Language, supra note 2, at 363-66; D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing,
supra note 2, at 4-5; L. Squires & M. Rombauer, supra note 2, at 110; H. Wei
hofen, supra note 2, at 50-51; Danet, supra note 2, at 477; Wydick, supra note 2, at
734.
11 See R. Dickerson, supra note 2, at 126-30; H. Weihofen, supra note 2, at
45-46; Danet, supra note 2, at 477; Wydick, supra note 2, at 731-32.
18 See R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 33-43; D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra
note 2, at 24; Wydick, supra note 2, at 729-39.
13 See R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 94-101; R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra
note 2, at 11-13; D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 28-38; Charrow
& Charrow, supra note 3, at 1324-25.
u See Hager, supra note 2, at 78.
18 See R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 58-69; Danet, supra note 2, at 476; Hager,
supra note 2, at 78.
16 See G. Block, supra note 2, at 8-9; Wydick, supra note 2, at 749.
17 See R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 16-17; Wydick, supra
note 2, at 752.
18 See R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 42-45.

sentences, tortuous phrasing, and boring passages filled with passive

verbs.”19 The objections to legal writing extend beyond criticisms of
vocabulary and sentence structure to complaints that lawyers create
“misty abstractions,”20 write about rules rather than facts and about
abstractions rather than characters and stories, and fill their writing
with “logical analysis and dozens of footnotes.”21
Quality in writing is easier to recognize than it is to define,22 but
the critics have offered concrete rules and a clear vision. To begin with,
legal writing should be plain, active, direct, and verbal:23 lawyers
should write short sentences in the active voice, use familiar and con
crete words, and employ them only in the sense in which they are un
derstood in common speech.24 They should avoid conceptual discus
sion26 and footnotes,26 or at least illustrate their abstractions with
concrete examples.27 They should write in the first person in a sponta-* 31 * 33 34 * 36 37
19 Stark, supra note 2, at 1389; accord G. Block, supra note 2, at 32-34; R.

Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 13-15; G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 29
31; D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra note 2, at 366-74; Danet, supra note 2, at
477-81; Hager, supra note 2, at 78. New Jersey courts and officials must consider
similar factors in determining whether a consumer contract is “simple, clear, under
standable and easily readable”: confusing cross references, sentences of greater length
than necessary, double negatives, exceptions to exceptions, sentences or sections in con
fusing or illogical order, the use of words with obsolete meanings or words whose legal
meanings differ from their common meanings, and the frequent use of words and
phrases from Old and Middle English, Latin, and French. See N.J. Stat. Ann.
§ 56:12-10(a) (West Supp. 1985).
ao Wydick, supra note 2, at 728.
31 Stark, supra note 2, at 1391. Fred Rodell protested against these same failings
in the 1930’s. See Rodell, Goodbye, supra note 2, at 39-41. In 1946, George Orwell
raised most of the same objections in a criticism of political writing. See G. Orwell,
Politics and the English Language, in 4 The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell 127, 133 (S. Orwell & I. Angus eds. 1968).
33 See R. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
33 See Lindgren, supra note 2, at 166.
34 See L. Squires & M. Rombauer, supra note 2, at 105-06; Hager, supra note
2, at 85; Wydick, supra note 2, at 736-40.
36 See D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 80 (“Legal terms of
art should not be used except as a last resort.”); id. at 83; Hager, supra note 2, at 85.
36 See D. Mellinkoff, Legal Writing, supra note 2, at 94.
37 [A]ll of us find it much easier to follow the abstract reasoning required in
legal controversies if we can imagine the concrete reality—the brutal mur
der, the devious dealings, the leaky pipes and spoiled merchandise—to
which the abstractions are being applied. . . . [A]H readers are naturally
interested in stories, especially stories that involve conflicts between human
beings or conflicts between human beings and their environment. And fi
nally, the reader’s sympathy is more likely to be aroused if the case is
presented as a concrete injustice being perpetrated on an innocent victim
than if it is presented as a technical violation of an abstract code. At the
heart of every legal action is a good story. Although lawyers can’t tell
these stories in exactly the same way novelists or journalists would tell
them, it is foolish to ignore their dramatic interest ....
R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 70-71.
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neous, conversational style,28 so that everyone can understand them.29

In other words, they should bring life into their writing and their
sentences to life.30 The classic examples are Holmes’s epigrams.31 The
proper style is that of the essayist, the journalist, and the novelist.32 33
The writings of Hemingway come to mind, particularly The Sun Also
Rises, to which the critics occasionally refer.83
Deep in the easy chair, even a lawyer generally prefers a good
novel to points and authorities from opposing counsel. Why then do
lawyers not write—not even try to write—like Hemingway? Many of
the critics who offer tips about effective writing seem to believe that
lawyers write badly out of habit or lack of experience. After discover
ing, however, that “even some of the brightest and most learned mem
bers of our profession write grotesque sentences,”34 *other critics have
probed further. They contend that the educational system is at fault:
English teachers in high school and college teach writing badly.36 But
poor instruction in secondary school and college does not explain why
writing in the law is particularly poor. Some critics have therefore
sought systemic or structural causes in the nature of the legal profession
itself. They have found two. First, lawyers have a financial interest in
writing badly. Second, the legal view of the world as an interrelation-
28 “As I see it, the best English today ... is informal, it is written exactly the
way it is spoken, it’s in the first person singular, it is specific, and it is conversa
tional . . . .” R, Flesch, A New Way to Better English 149 (1958).
as “[Xjhey ought to learn to write so that any cabbie could make sense of their
work." R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 84.
so “[x]he lawyer must give life to what he has to say, to make up for the inherent
lack of interest which his subject has for the reader’s imagination. None of us wish to
be informed, but all of us wish to be interested and especially to be moved.” Lavery,
31 “[E]ven a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
O.W. Holmes, The Common Law 3 (1891), quoted in D. Mellinkoff, Lan
guage, supra note 2, at 29, and in H. Weihofen, supra note 2, at 116. “The most
stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a
theater and causing a panic.” Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919)
(Holmes, J.), quoted in H. Weihofen, supra note 2, at 114. “[T]he machinery of
government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.” Bain
Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931) (Holmes, J.), quoted in R. Goldfarb
& J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 87.
32 “In the end, there is just plain good writing. Lawyers can master it more
quickly if they think like journalists.” Goldstein & Lieberman, Writing Like Pros(e),
Cal. Law., Jan. 1986, at 43, 46. But see R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note
2, at xv (“We are not so naive as to suppose that lawyers should write like journalists
or novelists . . . .”).
33 See Stark, supra note 2, at 1391; R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2,
at 146.
34 Lindgren, supra note 2, at 164.
38 See R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 26; Lindgren, supra note
2, at 165-67.

ship of abstract rules prevents lawyers from writing concretely.

Legal fees now run to $150 an hour and more. Even after lawyers
deduct secretarial and administrative'salaries and overhead, they are
generally well paid. The pay differential between lawyers and others is
often justified by reference to the lawyer’s skill at legal thinking. But,
according to the critics, even lawyers apparently wonder whether the
skill of thinking like a lawyer is really worth more than the skill of
thinking like a mechanic.36 The critics believe that, to dissemble the
difficulty, lawyers have created an arcane language, a professional
“doublespeak.”37 Lawyers fear that they will seem unprofessional and
even incompetent if they write simply38 They also believe that the
shroud of mystery will maintain and increase the public’s dependence
on lawyers.39 In the end, lawyers are con artists, magicians of lan
guage.40 The critics contend that the problems with legal writing arise
because lawyers are less interested in communicating than in defending
their privileged position.41
There is much to be said in favor of the perception of the bar and
the judiciary as a secret cult and the language of the law as the privi
leged communication of the initiate. In fact, many have noted the simi
larity between the judiciary and the priesthood—the black robes, the
stylized formulae of address, the sanctification of the witness’s testi
mony by a hand on the holy book.42 The symbols of the medieval judi
ciary elevate modern judges above the parties, above even all personal
interest in civil society, and bestow upon them the absolute impartiality
of the prophetess Deborah sitting under her palm tree.
The problem with this thesis is that it does not explain why law
yers cannot write. The critics contend that lawyers, by lengthening
their sentences and filling them with strange words, have developed an
esoteric language that protects their monopoly. But even texts that
draw on the arcane language and occult learning of secret cults need
38 See Stark, supra note 2, at 1390.

87 See id. at 1389.
38 See G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 13, 123.
39 See G. Block, supra note 2, at 39; G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 13, 123;
Caplan, Lawyers and Litigants: A Cult Reviewed, in Disabling Professions 93,102
(1977).
40 See Stark, supra note 2, at 1392.
41 “Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the aca
demic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They ex
clude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a
privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He
is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.”
Wydick, supra note 2, at 755-56 (quoting Galbraith, Writing, Typing S? Economics,
Atlantic, Mar. 1978, at 102, 105).
42 See, e.g., Leff, Law and, 87 Yale L.J. 989, 995-97 (1978).

not be badly written. Under the Volcano was constructed from Mal
colm Lowry’s personal synthesis of Mexican and Mediterranean my
thology with the Cabala.43 Yeats’s poetry grew out of his commitment
to Rosicrucianism, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Enochian Tab
let, Celtic mysteries, Tarot exercises, and Talismanic experiments.44
Mallarme cultivated an oracular obscurity—he was, as Verlaine noted,
so preoccupied with beauty that “he viewed clarity as a secondary
grace”43—and the Symbolists, in turn, made a cult of his insights and
gathered to venerate him every Tuesday evening on the rue de Rome.46
At least one Platonic dialogue—a superb example of classical Greek
prose—floats on a playful undercurrent of Pythagorean numerology, a
doctrine that was obscure even in antiquity.47
The second explanation for why lawyers write badly is based on
the notion, propounded by Steven Stark, that the language of the law
determines the way lawyers view the world.48 Unlike a normal person,
who feels compassion on hearing the story of a life-worn individual, the
lawyer sees only abstract fact situations to be subsumed under general
rules. For Stark, the case of Rummel v. Estelle49 clearly exemplifies
this lawyerly blindness. In Rummel, the Supreme Court upheld a life
sentence imposed on a man who, in three thefts, had taken less than
$250. According to Stark’s theory, lawyers find the holding fair because
they consider only abstract rules and not the personal consequences of
their argument. This dehumanization of legal argument prevents law
yers from recognizing a good story. Since lawyers do not perceive the
world like novelists, they are unable to write like them.
The contention is that the language of the law mediates between
the world and lawyers’ perceptions of it and prevents lawyers from
feeling compassion as would their neighbors. The thesis is thus neither
that everyone perceives the world abstractly (a kind of Kantian tran-
*3 See P. Epstein, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry (1969).

44 See Harper, Yeats’s Occult Papers, in Yeats and the Occult 1, 3 (G.
Harper ed. 1975). “Yeats himself suggested that he might not have been a poet at all if
he had not made magic his ‘constant study.’ ‘The mystical life,’ he wrote to John
O’Leary, ‘is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.’ ” Id. at
10.
46 P. Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, in Oeuvres en Prose Completes 657,
657 (J. Borel ed. 1972) (my translation).
46 See C. Mauclair, Mallarme chez lui (1935).
47 See Plato, Timaeus 17A, at 55 (R. Archer-Hind trans. 1888) (“One, two,
three—what is become of the fourth, my dear Timaeus . . . ?”); see also 1 Proclus
Diadochus, The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato 11-15
(T. Taylor trans. London 1820).
48 See Stark, supra note 2, at 1390, 1393; accord R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond,
supra note 2, at 3.
49 445 U.S. 263 (1980), discussed in Stark, supra note 2, at 1390.

scendental aesthetic)50 nor that a dehumanized language creates dehu

manization (an idea related to the Heideggerian view that language
brings things into being).51 *Rather it is a comment on the limiting ef
fect that a specific language has on perception, a version of the Whor-
fian hypothesis that differences in the habitual thought and behavior of
different societies can be traced to structural differences in their
languages.62
This second explanation is entirely at loggerheads with the first.
While the first explanation conceives of the law as a confidence game
and of the purpose of legal writing as client deception, this second the
ory asserts that lawyers are unaware of the truth behind their language
and thus are unable to maintain a critical distance from it.53 * * * * * * * * * *
This second thesis also fails to explain why lawyers write badly.
First, to the extent that the case of Rummel v. Estelle proves anything,
it shows that lawyers and judges do not all agree. Of the twenty-four
federal judges who heard the case, ten found Rummel’s punishment
cruel and unusual.64 Even some of the judges who voted to uphold the
80 See I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 65-91 (N.K. Smith trans. 1929).
51 “ ‘Where word breaks off no thing may be.’ ” M. Heidegger, The Nature of
Language, in On the Way to Language 60 (P. Hertz trans. 1971) (quoting the
poem “Das Wort,” from the collection Das Neue Reich, in 1 S. George, Werke:
Ausgabe in Zwei BXnden 466, 467 (1958)).
M See B. Whorf, The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language,
in Language, Thought, and Reality 134, 134 (J. Carroll ed. 1956).
Though the idea has led to productive research, the unqualified versions of the
theory—those, like Stark’s, that claim that language completely determines aspects of
thought and behavior—have not withstood critical examination. “Languages differ not
so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what is relatively easy to say.”
Hockett, Chinese versus English: An Exploration of the Wkorfian Theses, in Lan
guage in Culture 106, 122 (H. Hoijer ed. 1954); see also G. Kelling, Language:
Mirror, Tool, and Weapon 27-92 (1975) (criticizing the evidence offered in sup
port of the Whorfian hypothesis); J. Penn, Linguistic Relativity Versus Innate
Ideas 32-40 (1972) (evaluating the Whorfian hypothesis and its disrepute among those
with a historical perspective).
83 I do not mean to suggest that the two theories could not be reconciled. It might
be argued—though it would also have to be demonstrated—that the lawyer’s use of an
arcane language is a strategy without a strategist or a process without a subject of the
kind Foucault has described. See M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 95
(1978); see also Dan-Cohen, Decision Rules and Conduct Rules: On Acoustic Separa
tion in Criminal Law, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 625, 635-36 (1984) (discussing the Fou-
caultian notion of strategies). The logic of the strategy could be clear, yet no lawyer
would be hypocritical for employing it. Lawyers would simply be enmeshed in a system
of power, or rather the system of power would reside within them. That system of
power would also dictate the abstractions that constitute the lawyer’s view of the world.
The critics’ suggestions, however, are based on the assumption that the arcane language
is reproduced by countless decisions of individual lawyers and that any individual law
yer might decide to abandon it: “When and when not to use particular language is the
lawyer’s daily decision.” D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra note 2, at vii.
84 After the Texas courts affirmed his conviction and refused to grant post-convic
tion relief, Rummel filed a habeas petition in federal court. The federal district court

punishment found it inappropriate.*65 Their holding was based on the

limitations of the eighth amendment and not on any lack of compassion
for the prisoner.66 Furthermore, Stark’s criticism seems odd in the age
of post-Realism, when American legal education focuses on piercing the
precedential justifications in a judicial opinion in order to reveal the
personal prejudice at its base. The more typical criticism of the Ameri
can judiciary is that cases are decided on the basis of the judge’s politi
cal and moral preferences rather than on the basis of abstract legal
principle.
Another problem with Stark’s argument is that it is circular. If it
is lawyers’ language that determines their perception, their limited per
ception does not cause their language limitations. A baneful language
seems to be at the root as well as in the flower of the law, but there is
no indication of the source of the poison. The circularity reveals the
real criticism many critics seem to have of lawyers and the law. The
problem with the law is that it is the law—and not life. The problem
with lawyers is that they are lawyers67—and not ordinary people.68
denied his petition without a hearing. See Rummel v. Estelle, 568 F.2d 1193, 1195 (5th
Cir. 1978), rev’d en banc, 587 F.2d 651 (5th Cir. 1978), affd, 445 U.S. 263 (1980).
On appeal, a panel of the Fifth Circuit, by a vote of 2-to-l, reversed the district court
and held that Rummel’s punishment was unconstitutional. See id. at 1200. On rehear
ing en banc, the Fifth Circuit voted 8-to-6 to affirm the district court’s holding on the
eighth amendment. See Rummel v. Estelle, 587 F.2d 651, 662 (5th Cir. 1978) (en
banc), affd, 445 U.S. 263 (1980). By a vote of 5-to-4, the Supreme Court affirmed.
See Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263, 285 (1980).
6S “If the Constitution gave me a roving commission to impose upon the
criminal courts of Texas my own notions of enlightened policy, I would
not join the court’s opinion. . . . But the question for decision is not
whether we applaud or even whether we personally approve the proce
dures followed in [this case]. The question is whether those procedures fall
below the minimum level the [Constitution] will tolerate.”
Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263, 285 (1980) (Stewart, J., concurring) (quoting Spen
cer v. Texas, 385 U.S. 554, 569 (1967) (Stewart, J., concurring)).
56 “[w]e must remember that we can uphold a punishment as judges and disagree
with that punishment as men.” Rummel v. Estelle, 587 F.2d 651, 655 (5th Cir. 1978)
(en banc), affd, 445 U.S. 263 (1980).
57 “['rjhe main problem with legal writing has less to do with writing than with
lawyers themselves.” Stark, supra note 2, at 1392.
68 Lawyers are ordinary people, when they are not acting like lawyers.
These ordinary people, who communicate quite effectively in the course of
everyday affairs, shift gears intellectually whenever they decide they
should be acting like lawyers. The same lawyers who write dear and in
teresting letters to a kid in camp or a mother in the hospital go through a
Jekyll-and-Hyde mental transformation when they sit down to write (or
dictate) a business letter, a law review article, a judicial opinion, a law, a
regulation, a contract, whatever. They begin writing the way they think
lawyers are supposed to write. The result is stark and ludicrous.
R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at .130; see also Raymond, supra note 2,
at 2 (describing this transformation in greater detail).

Truth is present not in abstractions but rather in the world of normal

perception, in everyday life as perceived innocently, in ordinary lan
guage, in daily conversation. Once again, a certain reading of Heming
way can be heard in the overtones.
All of this—the circularity, the faulty reasoning—suggests to me
that the essays on legal writing are not what they purport to be. On
first reading, it seems that they examine a problem (lawyers cannot
write), explain its causes (lawyers are greedy and narrow-minded), and
propose a solution (lawyers, like novelists, should write, for ordinary
people). A closer reading, however, reveals that the explanations are
inconsistent and that they do not explain the phenomenon. The expla
nations—greed and narrow-mindedness—are really causes in search of
a problem. The problem the critics have chosen is the difficulty non
lawyers have understanding the law. Since lawyers at work never think
like ordinary people,69 it must be the lawyers’ fault. There is a barrier,
a distance, between lawyer and client;*60 that must be because lawyers
speak a foreign language.61 Since simple is best, and since the language
of the law is not simple, the difficulty must be the way lawyers write.62
The differences could be overcome if lawyers would simply surrender
to the language of the average human being, who, honest, worthy, and
compassionate, perceives the world accurately, fairly, and, in the end,
beautifully.63
Despite the critics’ rebellion against precedent’s dominion over the
law and their striving for “a new message, or at least a new way of
expressing that message,”64 *their own message is a classical construct of
Enlightenment thought. Rousseau, whose ideas so inspired the French
bourgeoisie that they adorned their Convention with his portrait and
voted to erect his statue in a Paris square, also believed that jurispru
dence is unnecessary for a people of innocence and virtue. Following
Montaigne, Rousseau preferred the simple justice of the American In
dians to Plato’s Laws,66 and, again following Montaigne, approved the
69 See R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at xiii.

60 See id. at xiii-xiv.
61 “ ‘Legalese’ isn’t listed in the foreign language section of any college catalogue,
but it probably should be. It takes as long to learn as French or Spanish, and to most
people it is just like Greek.” Pertschuk, Foreword to R. Flesch, supra note 2, at xi;
see also R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 3 (stating that lawyers learn
“a foreign language called legalese”).
62 “[0]ne reason lawyers suffer a bad public image—the reason we are interested
in discussing and one that easily could be avoided, to everyone’s benefit—is their atro
cious and pretentious prose.” R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at xiii.
es “Everybody knows Plain English. It’s the language you’ve known since child
hood.” R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 2.
M Stark, supra note 2, at 1391 (said of Hemingway).
es See J.-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse), in

decision of the Spanish King Ferdinand to deny lawyers passage to

America.68 As Rousseau’s characters report, what reigns under the
name of law is simply private interest and human passion.67 We should
seek the rules for conduct not in jurisprudence or philosophy, but
rather in an internal guide far more infallible than all the books:68 the
innate principles of justice and virtue written by nature in ineffaceable
characters at the bottom of the human heart.69 In other words, we can
be human without being learned; we are excused from consuming our
lives with the study of morality and the “terrifying apparatus of philos
ophy.”70 In fact, Rousseau contends, once learning appears among a
people, the virtuous are quietly eclipsed.71 It is thus only natural to
resist conceptual science and the elevated terminology of enlightenment,
knowledge, law, morality, and reason.72 We should strive to be more
simple and less vain, and to limit ourselves to the first sentiments to
which study always leads us when it does not lead us astray:73 “Every
thing I sense to be good is good; everything I sense to be bad is bad.”74
Rousseau’s ideas are an interesting parallel to the notions that I
think underlie the critics’ explanations for the poor quality of legal
writing, but they are also more than that. The championing of the av
erage reader’s common sense over lawyerly sophistication is an expres
sion of confidence in unaffected human nature, a confidence that is well
rooted in the society in which we live.75 The belief is that we all share
basic human values, but that these values are less accessible to those
who are overconcerned with intellectual and cultural refinement. At the
The First and Second Discourses 31, 42 n.* (R, Masters & J. Masters trans.
1964). The passage from Montaigne is found in 1 M. Montaigne, The Essays of
Montaigne 275-76 (G. Ives trans. 1925).
88 See J.-J. Rousseau, supra note 65, at 42 n.f (referring to 4 M. Montaigne,
supra note 65, at 288, 292).
87 See J.-J. Rousseau, Emile 473 (A. Bloom trans. 1979).
88 See J.-J. Rousseau, Sur la Reponse qui a ete faite a son Discours, in 3
Oeuvres Completes 35, 42 (B. Gagnebin & M. Raymond eds. 1964).
89 See J.-J. Rousseau, supra note 67, at 286, 289.
70 Id. at 290.
71 See J.-J. Rousseau, supra note 65, at 45.
72 See J.-J. Rousseau, Lettre a Monsieur TAbbe Raynal, in 3 Oeuvres Com
pletes, supra note 68, at 31, 33.
73 See J.-J. Rousseau, supra note 67, at 290.
74 Id. at 286.
78 [T]he ordinary man knows as much about justice as does the ordinary
judge. As a matter of fact, he usually knows more. For his ideas and ideals
about human conduct are more simple and direct. They are not all clut
tered up with a lot of ambiguous and unearthly principles nor impeded by
the habit of expressing them in a foreign language.
A training in The Law cannot make any man a better judge of jus
tice, and it is all too likely to make him a worse one.
F. Rodell, supra note 2, at 169.

beginning of this century, for example, Picasso stripped art of centu

ries-old layers of metaphor and convention after he recognized himself
in the masks and totems of African tribes.7076 Gauguin
* * * * * had made a simi
lar discovery in Polynesia.77 The German Expressionists came to the
same conclusion.78 79 The idea even contributes to our notion of the pic
turesque—the guidebook’s two stars for the unspoiled fishing village,
where life is kept to the essentials and follows the rhythm of nature.78
In other words, the scholarly critique is based on the unstated and
unexamined premise that truth lies in the concrete as the average non
lawyer perceives it and as the novelist records it.
This premise is rooted in a naive empiricism: the belief that all
that is important in the world—reality, in short—occurs in plain view..
That is the concrete. There is no need to make distinctions where em
pirical reality itself does not do so. Concepts, on the other hand, cannot
be seen. They are labels applied after the fact to action; they have no
referent in the observable world. They are therefore abstract. Con
cepts—^abstractions—simply clutter the page; the world is an open
book, written in the simplest of styles.80 Those who record their reflec
tions about the world should not make it seem mysterious when it is
not.
Unfortunately, this point of view—that it is possible simply by
pointing to indicate all that is concrete about the world—is a perspec
tive that, as Hegel remarked, the cow grazing in the pasture has al
ready overcome.81 For even though the world can be nothing for us
until we perceive it, perception is nothing until it is conceived. Think
ing about reality always means thinking the particular and the univer
sal concurrently. Thoughts vary, but whether they are chiefly involved
70 [W]hat Picasso recognized in [African] sculptures was ultimately a part

of himself, of his own psyche, and therefore a witness to the humanity he
shared with their carvers. He also realized that the Western artistic tradi
tion had lost much of the power either to address or to change the inner
man revealed in those sculptures.
Rubin, Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction, in 1 “Primitivism” in 20th Cen
tury Art 1, 73 (W. Rubin ed. 1984).
77 See Varnedoe, Gauguin, in 1 “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, supra
note 76, at 179, 180-83. Gauguin’s “primitivism” also involved a rejection of the natu
ralist antiprimitive pessimism of the time. See id.
70 See Gordon, German Expressionism, in 2 “Primitivism” in 20th Century
Art, supra note 76, at 369, 369-71.
79 “The port [of Le Croisic] is a picturesque and busy scene in winter with the
arrival of the prawn catchers.” Michelin Guide to Brittany 75 (7th ed. 1983).
80 “At its core, the law is not abstract; it is part of a real world full of people who
live and move and do things to other people.” Wydick, supra note 2, at 745.
81 See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind 159 (J. Baillie trans.
rev. ed. 1931).

with perception of the particular, or whether their concern is more for

the universal, they are always involved in both. That is why I rarely
see the splotches of maroon, ultramarine, brown, red, and navy blue in
front of me; I “see” rather the last five years of the Code of Federal
Regulations on my bookshelf. And even when I am startled by an un
conceived perception, as when two glowing spheres rise before me in a
dark street, I struggle to force them into a recognizable pattern and see
the eyes of a cat sitting on a fence. When standard categories fail, I
may even grasp at categories from the supernatural and try to recognize
the eyes of a ghost or the retreating taillights of a flying saucer. What
varies is only the degree to which thought has structured the categories
that guide perception.
Idle conversation, literature, and the law each involve different de
grees of conceptual understanding. Ordinary conversation is generally
structured by categories derived from daily life.82 The language of liter
ature and the language of law, on the other hand, are organized around
more developed categories: literature, by representation; the law, by
conceptual thought. It is only the myth of the universal applicability of
the Hemingway style that makes it seem as if the various levels of lan
guage and thought can be telescoped into one.
One of the ways literature differs from daily conversation is that it
is tightly organized around an idea. When a story is well written, all of
its elements point in the same direction, and the novelist is able to com
municate the idea through the form and the language of the story. No
novelist simply records an event or a snippet of dialogue. Novelists at
tempt rather to restructure the way their readers perceive the world.83
At the same time, however, the thought is not expressed directly, but
appears only through the language and the story. The most frequent
mistake in literary interpretation, even among critics, is to disregard the
epic function of literature and to take the pronouncement of one of the
characters for the meaning or message of the story. Another way of
expressing this idea is to say that meaning in literature is not expressed
conceptually but rather by representation.
The critics occasionally invoke the names of writers like Heming
way as symbols for clear, concise, simple writing.84 *And * even when
82 Cf. 3 K. Marx, Capital 967 (E. Untermann trans. 1909) (People feel com
fortable with economic conceptions that reflect their own experiences with the produc
tive relations of society.).
83 See U. Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose 48 (W. Weaver trans.
1984) (“[W]riting means constructing, through the text, one’s own model reader.”).
84 “A number of writing teachers would solve this problem by invoking the name
of Ernest Hemingway and demanding short, clear sentences.” Raymond, supra note 2,
at 6. Rudolf Flesch lists Pearl Buck, John Gunther, John Hersey, J.P. Marquand,

they do not mention Hemingway by name, they prefer a style that, on

the surface, resembles his. But Hemingway does not stand metonymi
cally for all of literature or for all novelists, or even for all novelists
writing English in the twentieth century. To my knowledge, no one has
suggested that lawyers imitate Finnegans Wake or Molly Bloom’s solil
oquy in Ulysses.86 Nor has anyone recommended the prose styles of
Faulkner, Barthelme, or William Gass. Instead, Hemingway stands for
a particular reading of modern literature, namely the view that litera
ture aspires to an idealization of daily perception and conversation. As
amanuensis for the simple life, Hemingway escapes Rousseau’s cri
tique, which ran against art and science as well as jurisprudence.
It is easy to be seduced by Hemingway’s dialogue and descrip
tions. He wrote more than his share of the few perfect pages in the
language. But his dialogue does not in the least resemble a transcrip
tion of daily conversation, even as edited and reorganized, and few of
his readers experience the details of their surroundings as intensely as
Hemingway was able to re-create the details of his. In fact, the inten
sity of dialogue and descriptive detail is neither a reflection of daily life
nor a simple mastery of style; rather, it is itself one of the ideas that
Hemingway sought to convey.
Hemingway portrayed a generation—Gertrude Stein called it “a
lost generation”—that had been abandoned by meaning and criteria of
value. The familiar values all seemed to have led inevitably to the dev
astation of the Great War, which tarnished not merely the ideas of
. patriotism, valor, and sacrifice, but also the very idea of transcendence
by which life is imbued with meaning. Hemingway wrote for the part
of that generation that abjured abstractions, for those who were left
with no alternative but to grasp madly at sensation. In momentary illu
mination, however, both Hemingway and his audience understood that
sensuousness provides no transcendence and that life without value or
meaning is simply lost.* 88
John O’Hara, Carl Sandburg, Rex Stout, James Thurber, and Thornton Wilder. See
R. Flesch, A New Way to Better English 150 (1958). All of the authors Flesch
named were contemporaries. Most wrote in an “idiomatic” style. In fact, several of
them fell under Hemingway’s influence. To John O’Hara, Hemingway was “ ‘[t]he
most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shake
speare, ... the most important, the most outstanding author out of the millions of
writers who have lived since 1616.’ ” F. MacShane, The Life of John O’Hara 153
(1980) (quoting O’Hara’s review of Hemingway in the N.Y. Times Book Rev., Sept.
10, 1950, at 1).
88 Cf. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182, 183
(S.D.N.Y. 1933) (“ ‘Ulysses’ is not an easy book to read or to understand.”), offd sub
nom. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 F.2d 705, 707
(2d Cir. 1934) (A. Hand, J.) (“Page after page of the book is, or seems to be,
incomprehensible.”).

Hemingway’s characters express these ideas directly at times.86

Even when they do not, the ideas saturate Hemingway’s language; they
are part of the meaning of the Hemingway style. It is a style from
which abstractions have been consciously banished, leaving the detail,
feverishly reworked, to stand alone. The critics have long recognized
Hemingway’s penchant for concealing abstractions87 and have recently
traced it through the manuscripts of The Sun Also Rises.88 In fact,
Hemingway himself freely discussed the technique.89 In other words, it
is precisely by its systematic avoidance of abstraction that Hemingway’s
language conveys a specific, complex, and vigorously developed insight.
His style is every bit as particular as that of the Naturalists or the
Symbolists or the Expressionists, and no more valuable in itself.90
Of course, the law too tells its stories. But it isolates from the story
the legally relevant facts and subsumes them under a rule of law. In
other words, the law does not remain on the level of representation, but
interprets the facts theoretically—and therefore conceptually.
Legal concepts are elements of a legal theory. The law is con
structed of “structured tiers of legal argument,”91 with principles ar
ranged according to their level of abstraction.92 Where two principles
86 I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice

and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the
rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through,
and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters
over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing
sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices
were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat
except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to
hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers
were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the
places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract
words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the
concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the
numbers of regiments and the dates.
E. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms 196 (1929).
87 See P. Young, Ernest Hemingway 177-78 (1952).
88 See F. Svoboda, Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises (1983).
88 If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he
may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing
truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the
writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to
only one-eighth of it being above water.
E. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon 192 (1932).
«o «[T]he terseness of style for which [Hemingway’s] early work is justly cele
brated is no more valuable, as an end in itself, than the baroque involutedness of
Faulkner’s prose, or the cold elegance of Wescott’s.” Schorer, Technique as Discovery,
in Essays in Modern Literary Criticism 189, 203 (R. West ed. 1952).
91 Fletcher, The Right and the Reasonable, 98 Harv. L. Rev. 949, 971 (1985)
(referring to levels of thought in continental legal analysis).
9a See Fletcher, Two Modes of Legal Thought, 90 Yale L.J. 970, 994 (1981)

yield contradictory implications for conduct, the principles are accom

modated in a more concrete rule.93 A legal concept represents a tightly
woven fabric of such rules and principles. For example, “contract,” as
a legal concept, represents the entire system of legal rules and princi
ples that govern the formation and performance of contracts 94 95
A legal concept fastens upon the common features of what, on the
surface, appear to be unrelated phenomena, such as a loan-participa
tion agreement and the sale of a stick of butter. Legal concepts make it
possible to find, in the diversity of appearances, cases that are similar
in relevant ways, and thereby permit the law to achieve its fundamental
mission of deciding like cases alike.96 It is also by virtue of its con
cepts—and not its stories—that the law attempts to have an effect upon
those subject to it. The concepts indicate the similarity among various
situations so that individuals will know to act similarly. Since the law is
a normative enterprise, however, neither all lawyers nor all legal sys
tems will necessarily use concepts in the same ways.
The separation of meaningful similarities from irrelevancies is
work that legal concepts, but not stories, can perform. The elements of
a story are undifferentiated and undifferentiable. Nothing in a story,
however well told, indicates how to recognize a second story that is, in
(describing the structure of the European legal codes).

95 Riggs v. Palmer, 115 N.Y. 506, 22 N.E. 188 (1889), discussed in Fletcher,
supra note 91, at 981, provides a good example. The rule of the case is that a desig
nated heir who murders the testator may not take under the will. The two principles in
conflict are (1) that a properly designated heir has a right to inherit, and (2) that
people should not profit from their own wrongs.
94 The structure of the rules and principles that make up a concept such as “con
tract” can be summarized in a chain of definitions. Unfortunately, in most existing
systems, the actual definitions are too complex to offer an easy demonstration. How
ever, in a simplified legal system, such as the one contained in the United Nations
Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, approved Apr. 11, 1980,
U.N. Doc. A/Conf. 97/18 (1980), “contract” might be defined as a binding agreement
involving two or more parties that produces legally enforceable obligations. As the defi
nition implies, the Convention is divided into two principal parts, one of which deals
with questions of formation (arts. 14-24) and the other with questions of performance
and breach (arts. 25-88). A binding agreement, in turn, results from the coincidence of
a valid offer and a valid acceptance. A valid offer is a proposition of terms that is
sufficiently definite and indicates an intent to be bound. Id. art. 14(1). An offer is
sufficiently definite if it provides an indication of the goods and a method for determin
ing the quantity and the price. Id. In different legal systems, the concepts have different
meanings because they are part of different legal theories.
96 Most legal problems turn on the question whether two cases are similar enough
to be governed by the same rule or whether they are distinct enough to be governed by
different rules. The criteria of similarity and difference develop as the law develops.
Nothing inherent in the law commits it to the blind, formal equality that is satisfied
simply by preventing both princes and paupers from sleeping under bridges. See C.
Perelman, Concerning Justice, in The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Ar
gument 1, 16 (1963).

relevant respects, like the first. That is why a good story does not sug
gest only the single meaning that certain commentators attempt to
wring from it. For example, even though we know from the first words
of the Odyssey that the poem is about the man of many devices,96 pre
cisely what Homer says about that man, and particularly about his
relationship to thought and Athena (or are they the same?), remains,
after two-and-a-half millennia, entirely unclear. Nor can the meaning
of Hamlet or Eugene Onegin or, for that matter, The Sun Also Rises
be stated while standing on one foot. Even though the meaning of legal
concepts is also frequently unclear, more is lost by summarizing a novel
in a sentence than by defining a legal concept. If prejudice is to be
ignored and like cases decided alike, legal analysis must use concepts
and not representation.
Because legal concepts are elements of a legal theory, lawyers do
not—and may not—use language as it is used in literature. Descrip
tions in the language of representation differ from descriptions in the
language of the concept in much the same way as, for Homer, the
names of certain places and objects as they are known to mortals differ
from the names of the same places and objects as they are known to the
gods.97 This difference is the truth behind the definition of a “legalism”
as “a word or phrase that a lawyer might use in drafting a contract or
a pleading but would not use in conversation . . . .”98
A further indication of the difference between the two lan
guages—that of literature and that of the law—is the extent of their
associational flux. Words in literature are exposed to constant connota-
tional shift. Even when a legal term is used in literature, its meaning is
not restricted to that of the legal concept. For example, when the Poet
writes, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up
remembrance of things past,”99 I, at least, hear only a distant echo of
procedural law. The legal terms have become metaphors softened with
alliteration and the perspective of solitude and reflection. Today, after
96 “Of the man of many devices, tell me, muse . . . .” The first words of the
Homeric proem state the subject of the poem. See van Groningen, The Proems of the
Iliad and the Odyssey, 9 Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche
Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling Letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) 279,
284-85 (1946).
97 The parallel between the language of representation and the language of man
kind, on the one hand, and the language of the concept and the language of the gods, on
the other, is Hegel’s. See Hegel, Book Review, 11 Werke 353, 378 (A. Moldenhauer
& K. Michel eds. 1970) (reviewing K.F. Goschel, Aphorismen Ober Nichtwissen
UND ABSOLUTES WlSSEN IM VeRHALTNISSE ZUR CHRISTLICHEN GlAUBENSERKENNT-
nis (Berlin 1829)).
98 Smith, A Primer of Opinion Writing, For Four New Judges, 21 Ark. L. Rev.
197, 209 (1967).
99 W. Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX.

Scott Montcrieff chose the last hemistich for the title of his translation
of Proust, the lines have gained additional resonance. Even in the lan
guage of the law, of course, context and connotation occasionally over
whelm the “plain meaning” of words, but the relevant contextual fac
tors are more limited and are usually phrased in terms of the “purpose
of the statute” or the “intent of the parties.”100
Cases like Rummel v. Estelle demonstrate that conceptual thinking
is essential to the law.101 Many people, even lawyers, feel uneasy about
the Court’s decision, feel intuitively, as Stark notes, that it is unfair.102
But, as intuitions, the notions of fairness and justice are abstractions, by
anyone’s definition. The difficult job—and that is the lawyer’s—is to
unpack intuitions, transform them into reasons, and argue the reasons
convincingly.103 Lawyers must understand the structure of the law and
create for their clients’ cases convincing legal constructs. As Rummel
shows, that is often an extremely difficult task. What the thousands of
Mr. Rummels in this country need is not a more sympathetic story but
a more convincing legal argument.104
100 Of course it is true that the words used, even in their literal sense, are
the primary, and ordinarily the most reliable, source of interpreting the
meaning of any writing: be it a statute, a contract, or anything else. But it
is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to
make a fortress out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always
have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imagi
native discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.
Cabell v. Markham, 148 F.2d 737, 739 (2d Cir.) (L. Hand, J.), affd, 326 U.S. 404
(1945).
101 See supra notes 49, 54-56 and accompanying text.
102 “The sentence imposed upon the petitioner would be viewed as grossly unjust
by virtually every layman and lawyer.” Rummel, 445 U.S. at 307 (Powell, J.,
dissenting).
103 It is about forty years too late to claim that difficult questions of law and social
organization should be resolved solely by intuition. The “uncritical glorification of intu
ition” was an essential feature of the destruction of reason, which prepared the way for
the destruction of the Weimar Republic. See G. Lukacs, The Destruction of Rea
son 10 (P. Palmer trans. 1980).
1M For example, Rummel might have questioned the “unique nature” of the
death penalty, which was the linchpin of the majority’s analysis in Rummel: “Because
a sentence of death differs in kind from any sentence of imprisonment, no matter how
long, our decisions applying the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments to capi
tal cases are of limited assistance in deciding the constitutionality of the punishment
meted out to Rummel.” Rummel, 445 U.S. at 272.
The majority’s distinction between capital punishment and life imprisonment
seems strange when considered in light of the history of criminal punishment. When
life imprisonment was first proposed, it was considered more severe than the death
penalty:
Perpetual slavery, then, has in it all that is necessary to deter the most
hardened and determined, as much as the punishment of death. I say it
has more. There are many who can look upon death with intrepidity and
firmness; some through fanaticism, and others through vanity, which at-

Thus, though I have cited Hegel for the proposition that the lan
guage of the concept differs from the language of representation,105 106 that
does not mean that only a German idealist would recognize the concep
tual nature of the law. In fact, a certain notion of the legal concept is
perfectly consistent even with ordinary language philosophy. Wittgen
stein seemed to recognize concepts as structures of rules when he hinted
that one of the meanings of the king in chess is the complex of rules
that determines its movement.106 The Scandinavian Realists, who be
lieved that the legal concept is completely meaningless—“[I]t is nothing
at all, merely a word, an empty word devoid of all semantic refer
ence”—understood the necessity of concepts for the presentation of legal
rules in their systematic order.107 Even these philosophers would agree
that the language of the law is more highly structured than is ordinary
discourse.
Unfortunately, Anglo-American legal scholarship no longer recog
nizes even a minimalist concept of the concept.108 Certainly the term
“concept” does not generally appear in the vocabulary of those who
write about legal writing.109 Instead, critics of legal writing believe that
tends us even to the grave; others from a desperate resolution, either to get
rid of their misery, or cease to live: but fanaticism and vanity forsake the
criminal in slavery, in chains and fetters, in an iron cage; and despair
seems rather the beginning than the end of their misery.
C. Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments 107-08 (4th ed. London
1785).
Of course, it would be difficult to argue today that life imprisonment, all things
considered, is more severe than the death penalty. Nonetheless, for eighth amendment
purposes, the qualitative distinction between the two punishments cannot be main
tained. The relevant criterion for evaluating punishment today is not the individual’s
perception of pleasure and pain, as it was for Beccaria, but rather the social effect of
punishment, the extent to which it isolates an individual from social activity. Since life
imprisonment prevents the prisoner from leading a meaningful, productive life in soci
ety just as effectively as does the death penalty, it must be judged by the same criteria.
Rummel failed to make this argument, and he even conceded “the unique severity of
the death penalty.” Brief for Petitioner at 61, Reply Brief for Petitioner at 3 n.2, Rum
mel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263 (1980).
105 See supra note 97.
109 See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 31 (G. Anscombe
trans. 3d ed. 1967). Wittgenstein notes that words may function as concepts when their
use is rigidly circumscribed by rules. See id. § 68.
107 See Ross, Tu-Tu, 70 Harv. L. Rev. 812, 818-19 (1957).
108 I am thinking about the concept in law and not the Haitian idea of the con
cept of law. See generally H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961). Nonetheless,
even though “concept” appears in the title, Hart does not, as I recall, define it in the
book.
108 Lawrence Friedman has the word but not the concept. He approves of legal
concepts because they are useful for “speedy communication” among lawyers. But he
does not explain what concepts communicate. See Friedman, supra note 5, at 564-66.
Reed Dickerson has long recognized the importance of conceptual clarity to good legal
writing. Unfortunately, he seems to think of a concept chiefly as the name for a class or

legal meaning is carried by special words called “terms of art.”110 A

term of art is defined as “a technical word with a specific meaning,”111
or “a short expression that (a) conveys a fairly well-agreed meaning,
and (b) saves the many words that would otherwise be needed to con
vey that meaning.”112 These definitions, however, do not distinguish
terms of art from other words in the language. Most words are short,
most have fairly well-accepted meanings, and most are more economical
than the corresponding circumlocution. The critics recognize that there
is something special about legal terms, but they are unable to specify
the difference.
The conceptual nature of the law produces two unpopular conse
quences. First, those who do not learn to think conceptually will be
unable to understand many of the texts that govern their legal obliga
tions. Of course, the general function, importance, or effect of a legal
concept in a particular situation can be described in short words and
simple sentences. But the courts, when there is difficulty, must rely on
the legal concept to determine the meaning of the plain words, or their
decisions will be wholly arbitrary. The situation in Poland after World
War II is instructive: the Polish government apparently attempted to
draft all laws so clearly that workers and peasants could understand
them, but it soon became clear that, without legal concepts, the applica
tion of the law was capricious and unpredictable.113 Thus, despite the
critics’ fervent wish and the idea’s utopian appeal, legal concepts cannot
be translated into Plain English by looking in a thesaurus,114 *and it is
either delusion or demagoguery to proclaim that those with no legal
training might understand a legal document merely because their vo
cabulary includes all of the words in which it is written.116 Some of the
group of individual entities. See R. Dickerson, supra note 2, at 7, 13-17. George

Gopen agrees that a legal concept summarizes a legal discussion: “It [takes] a few
hundred words to communicate one part of the legal concept of ‘intent’; it takes only
one word, ‘intent,’ to recall it for the lawyer.” G. Gopen, supra note 2, at 12.
110 See, e.g., D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra note 2, at 16-17; Wydick,
supra note 2, at 735; see also N.J. Stat. Ann. § 56:12-2 (West Supp. 1985) (“Use of
technical terms or words of art shall not in and of itself be a violation of this act.”); R.
Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at 7 (“[W]e distinguish between terms of art
that are legitimate because they have no equivalents in ordinary English and terms of
art that are vestigial and should be stated plainly.”).
1,1 D. Mellinkoff, Language, supra note 2, at 16 (citation omitted).
112 Wydick, supra note 2, at 735.
113 See L. Fuller, The Morality of Law 45 (rev. ed. 1969).
114 But see R. Flesch, supra note 2, at 27 (“If you can’t think of a good substi
tute, use any good thesaurus or book of synonyms. You’ll find that there’s no complex,
legalistic word that can’t be translated into Plain English.”).
118 Professor Dan-Cohen argues that there may be some benefit to having a sys
tem in which the public does not understand the full meaning of the legal concept.
According to his theory, the law communicates to the citizenry through the ordinary

critics may advocate Plain English because they fear that a majority of
Americans will never comprehend any but the simplest prose.118 But
they are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The ideal
society is not one in which conceptual thought has been abandoned, but
rather one in which everyone is able to engage in it. A critic once sug
gested to Bertolt Brecht that he clarify a difficult passage in one of his
plays, since the public otherwise would not understand it. “Why must
the public be able to understand everything on a first hearing?” Brecht
asked. “The audience will simply have to see the play twice.” The
critic reminded Brecht that many people could barely afford to see the
play once. “Then you’ll simply have to create for me a society,” Brecht
replied, “in which they can afford to see it twice.”*117116
118 * * * * *
The second consequence is one that most practitioners probably
already understand: the law must be written to meet the demands of
conceptual thinking, and that can be done well only by those who think
clearly. Of course, sentences in the law, as elsewhere, must conform to
the rules of grammar and proper punctuation. But even those rules,
though partially conventional, are fundamentally concerned with the
organization of thought. Even they cannot be taught formalistically. It
is even less useful to treat other elements of the thought process in a
formal manner. In other words, though a disciplined legal prose style
can be taught, it cannot be promulgated. That explains part of the
problem with the critics’ tips about effective legal writing. There is
simply no way, for example, to legislate the appropriate distance be
tween two periods. The tips, therefore, are either wholly arbi
trary—such as the suggestion that sentences should average no more
than a certain number of words in length118—or meaningless plati
tudes, like the reminder that sentences should be no longer than neces-
meaning of legal terms and leaves to the legal community the task of defining those
terms in a technical manner. See Dan-Cohen, supra note 53, at 652. He suggests that
the divergence between the two levels is designed to further legitimate goals. See id. at
665-77. But it is easy to imagine cases in which citizens ignore the meaning of the legal
concept at their peril. One example is the notion of “holder in due course” before the
enactment of the Uniform Consumer Credit Code.
116 Cf. supra note 29 and accompanying text.
117 Geschichten vom Herrn B.: 99 Brecht-Anekdoten 35 (A. Muller & G.
Semmer eds. 1967) (my translation). I thank Professor Jost Hermand of the University
of Wisconsin at Madison for telling the story and pointing me to the source.
118 See, e.g.. Conn. Gen. Stat. Ann. § 42-152(c)(l)-(2) (West Supp. 1985)
(The average number of words per sentence must be less than 22 and no sentence may
exceed 50 words in length.); L. Squires & M. Rombauer, supra note 2, at 77-78
(Sentences should average less than 25 words in length.). For comparison, note that
sentences in the passage from A Farewell to Arms that is quoted supra note 86 average
34.2 words in length, and the longest sentence is 76 words long.

sary119 and not so complex as to confuse the reader.120 Legal arguments

carry conviction not because of the length of the advocate’s sentences,
but rather because of the validity of the legal constructs.
However, the structure of a legal argument should not be consid
ered a transcendent essence, looming beyond or behind the language,
unrelated to the choice of words and the length of the sentences. A legal
argument is convincing only if the readers are convinced, and they can
be convinced only where each sentence carries the idea from the end of
the previous sentence to the beginning of the next, that is, where the
structure is present in the language. The persuasiveness of a legal text
appears on the surface as discursive elegance, but that elegance can be
achieved only where the conceptual structure withstands critical exami
nation. In other words, elegance of style refers not merely or even
chiefly to the rhetoricians’ concinnity—the sense of harmony and bal
ance at the level of language—but rather to the adaptation of form to
sense, the adequate expression of argument in language. Style is the
other side of structure; it is appearance and not mere show or seeming,
Erscheinung and not Schein.121
In one sense the critics are right: lawyers are generally not in
spired writers of prose. The real difficulties of legal writing, however,
are far more serious than technical problems of prose style; they are the
irrelevancies that reveal the absence of disciplined thought. Out of sen
timentalism, for example, some lawyers write statements of facts “like a
novelist,” in order to win the judge’s sympathy. Yet the pity in the tale
vanishes when judges attempt to subsume the facts under a rule of law
and are left on their own to discover which facts are legally relevant.
Sometimes, like Hamlet’s soliloquies, the structure of the paragraphs
reveals more about the author’s voyage of discovery than about the legal
argument. At other times, the lawyer fails to provide all the links of the
logical chain required to make a coherent legal argument and must rely
on the reader’s sense of fairness to bridge the gaps. Occasionally, eco
nomic, sociological, or political considerations are used not to bolster a
legal argument but to replace one. When lawyers do not understand the* 130 131
119 See N.J. Stat. Ann. § 56:12-10(a)(2) (West Supp. 1985); R. Dickerson,
supra note 2, at 113 (“The draftsman should avoid long sentences when shorter ones
will say the same thing as well.”) (footnote omitted).
130 See H. Weihofen, supra note 2, at 148.
131 As Hegel explains it, the essence of things does not exist immediately for con
sciousness. The relationship of consciousness to essence is mediated by something whose
independence tends to vanish in the process of understanding. This is appearance (Er
scheinung). However, being can also be conceived as isolated from or entirely without
essence. It is then mere semblance, show, or seeming (Schein). See G.W.F. Hegel,

structure of their argument before writing the final draft, their writing
will be loose and flabby and the easy prey of syntactical and other
grammatical errors. All of the rules of Plain English will then not pre
vent passive voice and dangling modifiers.122
These few examples make clear the absurdity of the constant lit
any that lawyers should write plain, clear, simple English. I have yet to
meet a lawyer who wishes to write anything else. The problem with
legal writing is not that there are too many “hereinbefores” and not
enough metaphor. The problem is that lawyers cannot write clearly
unless they can think clearly, unless they can recognize and construct a
convincing legal argument—unless, in other words, they understand the
structure of the law. Rudolf Flesch examined dozens of examples of
what he considered to be badly written legal prose.123 In almost every
case, the difficulty with the text was that it had not been thought
through. The texts were artifacts of the thought process, conglomerates
of several unsuccessful attempts to state the thought clearly. After disci
plined rethinking, Flesch was able to restate each example as a clear
proposition. The fact that he preferred to use short words and short
sentences is simply a stylistic restraint he imposed upon himself. He
might also have tried iambic pentameter.
The real problem with the tips for effective legal writing, and es
pecially with the implication that lawyers should write like novelists, is
that they do not address the difficulties of conceptual understanding. To
the extent lawyers believe that their problem lies exclusively in an un
derdeveloped prose style, they are condemned to write poorly forever.
The difficulty lawyers face in learning to write legal argument is
that they have little access to training in conceptual thought, either
outside the law or within it. At one time, conceptual thinking was
learned indirectly, by the reading of good books, but much less of that
is done today. By far the most powerful method was instruction in the
classics. Through the careful fitting of word to word and phrase to
phrase in translation, the study of Latin and Greek traditionally pro
vided an insight into the intimate relation between form and sense, lan-
14a A few critics, including George Gopen, recognize that muddled writing is most
often the product of muddled thinking: “Thought and expression of thought (in this
case, writing) are so inextricably intertwined that the quality of either one reflects the
quality of the other. Therefore good writing . . . cannot exist in the absence of good
thought. Conversely, poor writing indicates a lack of clarity or care in thought.” G.
Gopen, supra note 2, at 19. Gopen is an exception; most of the critics continue to focus
on the technical problems. But see also H. Weihofen, supra note 2, at 6-7, 135 (“The
lawyer who tries to be precise and clear in his writing may find that he must think a
point through more thoroughly before he can make an ambiguous statement more
clear.”).
143 See R. Flesch, supra note 2.

guage and argument. Even more importantly, the classics offered inti
macy with a complex structure of rules. In order to parse a Greek verb,
the modern reader must analyze its half-dozen constituent elements and
place it in one of the most intricate structures of rules and exceptions
ever developed. Today, in the wake of the jet airplane, foreign language
training employs, almost exclusively, repetition and patterned variation,
a technique that yields no insight into the structure either of the foreign
language or of one’s own. The schools have abandoned humanism and
instead stumble to keep pace with technological development. As a re
sult, a reading knowledge of classical Greek is probably as rare in con
temporary America as it was in pre-Erasmian Europe. Yet no substi
tute has been found for the classics.124 125
Despite the ritual of the first year of law school, many lawyers do
not learn to think conceptually. The reason may be that doctrinal anal
ysis, the specifically legal training in conceptual thinking, is in de
cline.126 Those who find economic motive everywhere else also find it
here: they suggest that the doctrinal analysts prefer the salaries at large
law firms to teaching.126 I believe another factor is more important:
legal reasoning itself is in crisis, and we simply cannot agree on how
judges decide cases. Contemporary legal education has responded to the
difficulty by avoiding it. Instead of probing the structure of American
law, law professors and their students are tempted to regard it exter
nally, from the perspective of their undergraduate majors:
microeconomics, analytic philosophy, political science, sociology, psy
chology, anthropology, literary theory, or whatever.127 From that per-
ia< It was due to [Harvard President] Eliot’s insistent pressure that the
Harvard Faculty abolished the Greek requirement for entrance in 1887,
after dropping required Latin and Greek for freshman year. His and
Harvard’s reputation, the pressure of teachers trained in the new learning,
and of parents wanting ‘practical’ instruction for their sons, soon had the
classics on the run, in schools as well as colleges; and no equivalent to the
classics, for mental training, cultural background, or solid satisfaction in
after life, has yet been discovered. It is a hard saying, but Mr. Eliot, more
than any other man, is responsible for the greatest educational crime of
the century against American youth—depriving him of his classical
heritage.
S.E. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard 389-90 (1936).
125 See Posner, The Present Situation in Legal Scholarship, 90 Yale L.J. 1113,
1113-18 (1981).
129 See id. at 1117.
127 The brightest of the [law teaching] candidates, though typically “willing
to ‘do’ torts,” have as their principal interest some body of scholarship
outside the law. They have discovered in, say, economics or social-choice
theory, some lance of insight with which they are prepared to take a tilt at
the law—any body of legal rules should do—in some way it has not been
tilted at before.
Stone, From a Language Perspective, 90 Yale L.J. 1149, 1151 (1981).

spective, it is difficult to see—and far more difficult to communi

cate—the conceptual structure of a legal argument. Since scholars
themselves no longer conceive of legal concepts as elements of a legal
theory, as complex structures of determination, their students learn
conceptual thinking only with great difficulty. Little do the scholars
suspect that their own teaching is one of the reasons lawyers write
poorly.
The sheer mass of the modern law encourages this flight from the
basics. The proliferation of new fields of practice requires the practi
tioner to be acquainted with ever more rules—tax, securities, anti
trust—but the acquaintance with the whole becomes more and more
superficial. The increase in regulations and administrative interpreta
tions and decisions makes it seem more important to find the apposite
sentence in an obscure no-action letter than to construct a reasoned le
gal argument. On-line research provides the only access to much of this
material. Yet, despite its advantageous potential, Lexis deemphasizes
the lawyer’s systematic knowledge of the law and makes it more diffi
cult to place the structure of the law at the center of legal education.
“Law and whatever” jurisprudence, whether based on marginal utility
theory or democratic socialism, succeeds because it offers a framework
for these rules that is more accessible than that provided by an overview
of the constantly changing structure of the law itself. But the extra
legal framework, even when supplemented with a good sense for search
logic, cannot generate a well-written appellate brief or a carefully con
structed contract.
It is easy to forget, because we tend to cite their epigrams rather
than read their opinions, that those whose legal prose we ad
mire—Holmes, Brandeis, Gardozo—were masters of legal construction.
Their fine prose style is really a reflection of their ability to create legal
theories that are appropriate to the facts. They gained that ability pre
cisely through their formalist legal education. But legal construction re
mains the essence of the lawyer’s task regardless of the lawyer’s theory
of adjudication: good legal writing is still clear conceptual thinking,
convincingly displayed. Of course, there is today no path back to the
innocence of pre-Realist legal education. If, after the death of Contract,
legal writing is to improve, alternative access must be found to the
structure of the law and the nature of legal argument.
One of the few substitutes I know for formalist legal training is a
background in comparative law, the discovery of the particular struc
ture of one legal system by comparing it to another. The comparison,

which begins by comparing the solutions that various legal systems pro
vide in response to similar problems, makes it clear that legal theories,
even those applied in similarly advanced industrial nations to the tran
quil problems of private law, are remarkably diverse. If systems of
comparable economic sophistication solve the same problems differ
ently, the solutions are not compelled by practical necessity. In other
words, even the comparison of individual norms can emancipate legal
education from the illusion, fostered by some versions of the “law and
whatever” jurisprudence, that scientific knowledge can determine a le
gal result. Just because the world is a certain way does not mean it
should remain that way. The comparison makes it clear that the law is
a normative science in which reasons and convincing presentation are
decisive.
The real benefit of comparative law, however, lies elsewhere. It
provides access to a realm of universality beyond that of the legal con
cept, to the principles that provide the foundation for a legal system.
For the differences in legal construction are not arbitrary. Each legal
system is a discrete hierarchy of norms based on its own set of—often
unspoken—premises and principles.128 129 Comparative law shows that an
elegant legal solution is one that produces a convincing result with the .
elements and within the framework of a given legal system.
Goethe noted that those who have no acquaintance with foreign
languages know nothing of their own.128 The statement is equally true
of the law.130 Yet despite the critical importance of comparison for the
128 The conveyance or passage of title under French civil law provides a good
example. Under French law, as between the parties, title generally passes at the con
clusion of the contract, unless the parties have agreed otherwise. See Code Civil [C.
Civ.] arts. 1138, 1583 (Fr.). Passage of title does not depend on a separate act, such as
the delivery of goods or the execution and delivery of a deed. Thus, if we were to meet
on a street corner in Paris and you were to offer me your Chateau Blackacre for
10,000,000 FF and I to accept, we would not only have concluded a land-sale contract,
but would also have conveyed title to real property. One of the bases for this rule was
the Enlightenment’s confidence in the power of human reason and its expression as a
declaration of will. According to this view, it would have insulted human reason to
require an additional act to convey property rights. “Thus human will, assisted by all
the power of the law, traverses every distance, transcends every obstacle, and becomes
present everywhere like the law itself.” Portalis, Presentation au corps legislatif, in 14
Recueil Complex des Travaux Preparatoires du Code Civil 108, 113 (P.
Fenet ed. 1827) (my translation).
129 J. von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe no. 414, at
154 (B. Saunders trans. 1893).
130 The best way to appraise the limitations and the niceties of one’s own
language, and so to learn some of the secrets of its use, is to look at it from
the observation post of another language. Acquaintance with a second
tongue makes one self-conscious and critical about one’s own. It is not
different in the study of law. We gain a healthy skepticism in regard to
the completeness and permanence of our own solutions. We gain a per-

study of the law, the comparative method has not made great strides in
America. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, compar
ative law was “the jealous mistress’ indigent relative,” a subject “ ‘of no
apparent immediate utility to the private practitioner.’ ”131 During the
1930’s, largely due to the influx of foreign legal scholars, the topic
seemed full of promise.132 Yet Richard Posner was able to survey re
cent American legal scholarship without even mentioning comparative
law as a legal discipline.133 Whatever their own doctrinal impact, the
visitors were unable to convince American legal scholars that there was
anything to be learned from abroad. To be fair, one must admit that
the difficulties were formidable. To begin with, there were those
damned foreign languages. And then, irritatingly, the importance of the
comparative method was lost on those without a conceptual under
standing of the law. Whatever the reasons, the opportunity has passed,
and it is now unlikely that comparative law will ever become a primary
focus of American legal thought.
I do not hold much hope for the future of legal writing in
America. Because few sources remain for the widespread infusion of
conceptual understanding into legal education, I suspect that each gen
eration of lawyers will write at least as badly as its predecessor.134 *Le
gal writing will become increasingly technocratic as prescriptions gen
erated by unexamined premises are continually applied to misperceived
situations.
But there is no reason to lament. Prose itself seems to be losing its
hold as the prime medium for the communication of thought. It was
Victor Hugo’s insight that the printing press had destroyed the cathe
dral.136 Once writing replaced stone sculpture and stained glass as the
principal medium for education, the days of stonecarving as a fine art
spective and a sense of proportion, le&ming that our system, like any other
system, is not a true norm, but that all systems are only partially success
ful attempts.
Smith, Report of the Dean, Colum. U. Bull. Information, 36th Series, No. 20, at
5-6 (1935), quoted in Deak, The Place of Foreign and Comparative Law in the Amer
ican Law Reviews, 23 Va. L. Rev. 22, 22 (1936).
131 Hug & Ireland, The Progress of Comparative Law, 6 Tul. L. Rev. 68, 68
(1931) (quoting A. Reed, Training for the Public Profession of the Law 299
(1921)).
133 Ernst Rabel, one of the founders of modern comparative law, was one of the
refugees, and two of his close collaborators—Friedrich Kessler and Max Rhein-
stein—were at the center of American legal education for several decades.
133 See Posner, supra note 125.
134 See Collins & Hattenhauer, supra note 2, at 142 (“[M]any authors note
among prelaw students, law students, and working attorneys the decline in writing
skills noted generally over the last decade.”).
133 See 1 V. Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris 129 (J. Beckwith trans. 1892).

were numbered. Today, tapes, film, video, and floppy disks offer ex
traordinary possibilities for the multidimensional presentation of ideas
and argument.136 The time is coming when prose composition will take
its place beside stonecarving as one of the lost arts.
136 Even in the traditional academic disciplines, the new media are replacing lan
guage skills. At Indiana University, for example, a doctoral candidate in political sci
ence may meet the “Foreign Language/Research-skill Requirement” by demonstrating
“proficiency in any two of the following: French, German, Spanish, Russian, mathe
matics, logic, statistics, or computer science.” See 82 Ind. Univ. Bull.: Graduate
Sch. 191 (1984). Masters students generally must demonstrate proficiency in one for
eign language or in one of the approved research skills, but “[s]tudents specializing in
public administration, law, and policy must use an approved research skill, not a for
eign language, to meet this requirement.” Id.

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A defense of legal writing

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A DEFENSE OF LEGAL WRITING

Legal writing is on the run. Lawyers have long attempted, without

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do not understand what lawyers write,3 several jurisdictions have pro­

3 See, e.g., A. Elwork, B. Sales & J. Alfini, Making Jury Instructions

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sentences, tortuous phrasing, and boring passages filled with passive

19 Stark, supra note 2, at 1389; accord G. Block, supra note 2, at 32-34; R.

neous, conversational style,28 so that everyone can understand them.29

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ship of abstract rules prevents lawyers from writing concretely.

38 See Stark, supra note 2, at 1390.

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*3 See P. Epstein, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry (1969).

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scendental aesthetic)50 nor that a dehumanized language creates dehu­

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punishment found it inappropriate.*65 Their holding was based on the

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Truth is present not in abstractions but rather in the world of normal

69 See R. Goldfarb & J. Raymond, supra note 2, at xiii.

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decision of the Spanish King Ferdinand to deny lawyers passage to

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beginning of this century, for example, Picasso stripped art of centu­

70 [W]hat Picasso recognized in [African] sculptures was ultimately a part

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with perception of the particular, or whether their concern is more for

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they do not mention Hemingway by name, they prefer a style that, on

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Hemingway’s characters express these ideas directly at times.86

86 I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice

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yield contradictory implications for conduct, the principles are accom­

(describing the structure of the European legal codes).

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legal meaning is carried by special words called “terms of art.”110 A

group of individual entities. See R. Dickerson, supra note 2, at 7, 13-17. George

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 618 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 619 1985-1986

sary119 and not so complex as to confuse the reader.120 Legal arguments

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 620 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 621 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 622 1985-1986

spective, it is difficult to see—and far more difficult to communi­

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 623 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 624 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 625 1985-1986

HeinOnline -- 134 U. Pa. L. Rev. 626 1985-1986

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