Friday, October 19th, 2007...8:48 am
Kozinski on Legal Writing
From the law.com profile of Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit starting December 1st:
”I’m buying old copies of Playboy magazine on eBay, because everything I learned about writing I learned from Playboy fiction,” he said in a recent phone interview.
And he wants to pass writing skills on to his law clerks, particularly the writing of Richard Matheson, he said. He readily shares copies of science-fiction author’s stories with their tight, declarative sentence structure that moves action quickly.
Professor Eugene Volokh of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, who clerked for Kozinski from 1992 to 1993, called it an incredible, invigorating experience, working 80 hours a week and “learning how to write clearly and eloquently without being grandiose,” often through 50 or 60 drafts. “He always asks, ‘Does it sing?’” Volokh said.
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