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Looking for something out-of-the-ordinary in nonfiction? Bryan A. Garner’s newest book, The Etcher: The Life and Art of Oskar Stoessel (Godine, 2025), warrants a place on any lawyer’s reading list. Why? Here are five reasons:
One occasionally meets a lawyer who claims, “Oh, I’m no stylist. I leave style to others. I’m just interested in the facts and the law.” This view is founded on a basic misunderstanding. Style isn’t something extraneous to legal writing—it’s intrinsic and unavoidable. The act of writing itself consists of a thousand choices. As lawyers select words, construct sentences, and d...
Writing without an outline is the literary equivalent of setting out on a journey without knowing where you’re going, except that every wrong turn must later be retraced. You may begin with gusto, but soon your energy will be consumed by structural confusion—sections will overlap, arguments wander, and paragraphs queue for a purpose that never quite arrives. Far from liberati...
Many legal briefs resemble medieval manuscripts—dense, austere, and allergic to imagery. Illustrations appear mostly in patent cases, where a circuit diagram or a sectional view can seem mandatory rather than inspired. Yet visuals shouldn’t be confined to the technocratic side of litigation. The law traffics in relationships—chronological, causal, hierarchical—that words ofte...
A researching lawyer should refine the question to be addressed in a research memorandum. Why? The phrasing of that question determines the entire direction, clarity, and utility of the resulting analysis. Many junior lawyers mistakenly assume that the assigning lawyer has already articulated the most precise question possible. In reality, though, the initial formulation is o...
