Product Description

With expanded coverage in this new edition, The Elements of Legal Style features additional sections, many more examples, and a thoroughly researched appendix that contains 80 major statements on prose style--what it is and how to attain it. Inspired by Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, this book clearly (often wittily) explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow in using headings, defined terms, quotations, and many other devices. Garner also provides abundant examples from the best legal writers of yesterday and today, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Frank Easterbrook, and Antonin Scalia.
If you want to make your writing clearer, more precise, more persuasive, and above all more stylish, The Elements of Legal Style offers the surest--and the most enjoyable--means to that end.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7474 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-21
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Library Journal
A decade after the key first edition, Garner, editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary and other works on legal writing, provides expanded coverage of appropriate legal prose and common errors in legal language, with the goal of encouraging clarity in legal writing. Throughout, he emphasizes fundamental rules of usage and fundamental principles of legal writing that range from punctuation, word choice, and syntactic arrangement to various forms of repetition. Suggestions regarding word choice give a good indication of his approach: he guides writers to strike out and replace fancy words, challenge vague words, and eschew euphemisms. In the foreword, Charles Alan Wright accurately comments that for lawyers "words are the only things we have to work with." Indeed, this book speaks not only to lawyers but to other writers as well, urging them to use style to develop persuasion, description, or analysis. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Publishers each year spew out writing books for law students by the dozen. Forget them. This is the best. We had not believed that this classic work could be substantially improved. The inimitable Mr. Garner has proven this belief wrong, and happily so."-ABA Appellate Practice Journal
"Garner has given to the legal profession [an] extraordinary book....Invaluable."--South Dakota Law Review
"Bryan Garner...is rapidly becoming--if he's not there already--America's foremost authority on language and the law."--Barrister
"An expanded and more relaxed edition of his 1991 sourcebook."--William Safire, New York Times Magazine

Book Info
Clearly explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow in using headings, defined terms, quotations, and many other devices. Written for lawyers, law students, judges, law clerks, and for anyone who writes in and about the law.

Customer Reviews

Like HAL 9000 addressing the Harvard Club
This book gets a 5/5 for substance but a 1/5 for style.

To be fair, the writer of any book about writing has the heightened duties of the bomb-disposal technician or the internal affairs detective. Garner is fastidious to a fault and, given his audience, this is understandable. But the final product sounds like William F. Buckley, Jr. reading the phone book through Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. This is not boring, but distractingly awkward. I found myself paying more attention to the author's ecclectic phrase choices and mincing composition than his message. Garner weighs the advantanges of the spare "Attic" style of writing (Holmes) against the florid "asiatic" style (Cardozo), then somehow manages to adopt the worst of both of them.

(And did he really just say "asiatic?")

As a member and fan of the "California" school of legal writing (Kozinski) and rhetoric (Nancy Grace), I admit my distaste for this book is personal. The information itself is valuable. However, the content here overlaps substantially with "The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)." As a day-to-day reference work, that book is a much better bang for your buck.

Not just for lawyers
I am a physician who tested out of all college English to focus on science. Writing chart notes, scientific articles, or even parts of textbooks does not prepare one for the type of writing one must do when performing legal work.

Scientific-technical writing, legal writing, or the best-selling novel all require different writing styles. Mr. Garner's book must be a help to law students based on other reviews but importantly to me; it is very accessable to those who have never attended law school.

Legal style is a "style" that is important in the profession of law. If you do any work in this area at all, whether it is on the stand or writing essays, it behooves the non-lawyer to read this book. So, even though I agree with the glowing reviews from lawyers, this book may be even more important to those of us who must do legal work but have never been to law school.

Shockingly good
In short, this is the first and only style guide that I have ever been excited to continue reading and share with others. It has really improved my writing.