Scalia and Garner: Improve Your Writing by Improving Your Reading

[WSJ Law Blog]

“As you read, so will you write,” advise Scalia and Garner in their new book, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, published this week. Scalia and Garner — though we know they don’t have the Law Blog in mind — suggest that if you read only “pulp novels” and “tabloid newspapers” you will most likely wind up writing like them.

(Click here for yesterday’s post about Scalia and Garner’s advice to concede your weakest points.)

Most lawyers, they concede, “have probably not descended to that level of recreational reading material — but alas, their everyday. . . .reading is (literarily speaking) even worse. Lawyers tend to be bad writers because their profession condemns them to a diet of bad reading material.”

The highest lawyers go “up the literary ladder, so to speak, is judicial opinions — which are widely read not, heaven knows, because they are well written (nor even because they are necessarily well reasoned) but because they are authoritative,” Scalia and Garner say.

So what should lawyers read? On this point, Garner and Scalia, a self-professed social conservative, turn to Seventh Circuit judge Frank Easterbrook, who says: “The best way to become a good legal writer is to spend more time reading good prose. And legal prose ain’t that! So read good prose. And then when you come back and start writing legal documents, see if you can write your document like a good article in The Atlantic. . . .”

LB Readers: Do you agree with Scalia and Garner that bad legal literature — judicial opinions included — is degrading lawyers’ prose styles, contributing to poorly written briefs? And what do you suggest to your colleagues to cure the ail?

(N.B. We at the Law Blog enjoy debating the merits of Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence as much as our readers do. But on this post we’d love to hear from you on the topic of his book.)