Alaska Employment Law

I admire Richard Posner’s opinions as pieces of literature, essays on legal issues.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a reorganization or a reinsurance case; I just enjoy his style.   No summary of facts, followed by a standard of appellate review, and then a Roman-numbered catalogue of issues and sub-issues.  Posner works the facts into a narrative that addresses only dispositive issues.  No footnotes, no string citations.  When he and Frank Easterbrook disagree, the pleasure is doubled.   

If you’re also taken with forceful appellate writing, and wonder how judges like Posner and Easterbrook do it, take a look at Toward a More Impure Writing Style, an article by Brian Paul that I found via the (new) legal writer, Raymond Ward’s daily blog about just that.

Here’s some recent writing advice from Posner:

A note, finally, on advocacy in this court. The lawyers’ oral arguments were excellent. But their briefs, although well written and professionally competent, were difficult for us judges to understand because of the density of the reinsurance jargon in them. There is nothing wrong with a specialized vocabulary-for use by specialists. Federal district and circuit judges, however, with the partial exception of the judges of the court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (which is semi-specialized), are generalists. We hear very few cases involving reinsurance, and cannot possibly achieve expertise in reinsurance practices except by the happenstance of having practiced in that area before becoming a judge, as none of us has. Lawyers should understand the judges’ limited knowledge of specialized fields and choose their vocabulary accordingly. Every esoteric term used by the reinsurance industry has a counterpart in ordinary English, as we hope this opinion has demonstrated. The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves.

Indiana Lumbermens Mut. Ins. Co. v. Reinsurance Results, Inc., 2008 WL 141795 *5 (Jan. 16, 2008).