Legal Writing

Legal Writing Handbook for Clinical Students

This handbook is for upper-level students enrolled in a clinic, who are expected to draft legal memorandums, briefs, client letters, and pleadings with minimal supervision. Each chapter focuses on a single writing skill. The exercises and examples consistently and cogently employ the techniques and devices advocated in the book.

Clinical students learn by doing. Still, their legal writing experience is limited, so guiding them through written assignments is challenging. They simultaneously need specific feedback on legal writing from their professors, and the opportunity to do as much as possible on their own. I wrote this handbook with that challenge in mind.

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation

This electronic publication was conceived in the summer of 1992. A small band of Cornell Law students, charged with identifying subjects on which computer-based materials would be particularly helpful, placed citation at the top of the list. With their assistance I prepared the first edition of Introduction to Basic Legal Citation. It was released on diskette that fall, one of the first hypertext publications of Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII).