Note: This page will be expanded as the semester progresses and the mileposts approach. The first milepost, Tuesday, February 5, involves topic selection. The second, submission of a detailed outline, is September 26. -- N.J. 20020108; revised . . ..

Topic Selection

Outlining

Reactions to Outlines

Reactions to First Final Drafts

The first milepost is topic selection. This is, in many ways, the most difficult and important stage of writing. What is it you are going to be researching and writing about and why? Who is your intended audience? What is it you are trying to accomplish with this piece -- merely informing, arguing a position, advising, changing current practice, encouraging new legislation?

1. This is not something you pluck out of the air at the last minute before it is due. It is something that results from a lot of research, exploration of the Internet and other literature, and thought. The more time you put in on it now the better will be your ultimate choice, and the more fun and benefit you'll get from the paper and the seminar.

2. Caveat: You are writing a law school paper. Most professional or academic papers contain some general description that any non-professional could read and understand. Portions of your paper may, likewise, read like a good newspaper feature story or an article in the Atlantic magazine. To some degree that's necessary. But you must exercise some discretion in balancing the portion of your paper that is good journalism with that which demonstrates your ability in using legal skills. By legal skills I mean pulling a holding from a case, synthesizing a number of holdings into a rule of law, interpreting a statute, drafting legal provisions in legislation or contracts, or law review-like doctrinal analysis. In part, this requirement is satisfied by the research and writing that you will do later in the semester. The reason it is mentioned now is that the framing of your topic can aid, or hinder, your ability to write a legal paper.

3. What do you do if there is no "law" directly on point? The same thing lawyers always do when there is no law directly on point. You look for analogies.

For example, suppose you want to explore the professional ethics in using a Web page to market legal services. Let's assume you look for, but cannot find, anything directly on point regarding, say, the ethical issues that might arise from the fact that this would be "practicing law" in jurisdictions other than those in which the Web page lawyer is licensed to practice. What do you do? Perhaps you can find something involving the practice of law by way of telephone or fax communication with clients in states in which a lawyer is not licensed to practice.

(a) Teach yourself, and apply, perfectBlue Book form from the get-go. Once you find a source you know you will want to use, get the cite, and get it right, the very first time. Don't say, "Oh, I'll do that later." Best case, doing a "cite check" later is a duplication and waste of time. Worst case, you may not be able to find it later. If it's not second nature for you already, you'll be pleasantly surprised how quickly you'll master all but the most arcane Blue Book citation requirements.

(b) You are, of course, not forbidden to use hard copy, Westlaw or Lexis cites. But there are a number of reasons to at least begin with a thorough search for material available on the Internet.

(1) It's a wonderful source that may well offer you material not otherwise available.

(2) That's where your paper will be published. That's where your readers will be.

(3) You can "incorporate by reference" enormous bodies of material with a simple link.

(4) Besides, knowing how to use the Internet for all it's worth is as important to a lawyer today as knowing Westlaw and Lexis 20 years ago, or the West Key Number system 20 years before that.

(5) This is an opportunity to get academic credit for something you'll need to teach yourself anyway.

(c) Remember to send me by e-mail the URLs (Web site addresses) of locations you find especially useful.

5. What I will be looking for in grading your paper is also something to keep in mind when selecting a topic. It will include such things as: demonstration of legal skills in analysis, quantity and quality of research; breadth of sources (e.g., court opinions, statutory material, law review articles); innovation and imagination in the selection of analogies; creativity and innovation in selection of topic and content; quality of writing; and use of correct (Blue Book) citation form. [See also "Defining a Seminar -- and Standards for Grading" in "Participants' Responsibilities and Expectations."]

1. If you go about the outlining task correctly you should have most of your research and organization (to a somewhat detailed level -- what I have called a "three-level outline") done by the time your outline is finished. There's always more research to do, and the writing -- which almost writes itself once you have a detailed outline -- will take time and polishing. But you will have broken the back of the project and be well on your way to the fun part, and finishing it.

2. Someone at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University has written "A Guide to Good Legal Writing: An Introduction to the Writing Process."  It is, in some ways, the first thing you should look at before beginning this project. But it is also relevant, now, with regard to your outlining.

3. For a one-screen/page look at a "three-level outline," see "Basic Outlining," from the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

4. Professor Pam Samuelson, skilled in many aspects of the law, has written a helpful piece in the 1984 University of Pittsburgh Law Review entitled, "Good Legal Writing: Of Orwell and Window Panes," which has some reference to outlining but is primarily recommended for its overall view of legal writing tips useful to you in this assignment. (For example, her discussion of the first of her "Six Paramount Rules of Good Legal Writing" ("Have a Point") is of special relevance to your selection, refinement and narrowing of your "topic.")

5. Equally useful as a general approach to legal writing is Eugene Volokh's "Writing a Student Article," and, in this context the section of it entitled "Organizing the Article."

For the most part the outlines are fine. You should, in any event, proceed with your research and drafting of your “first final draft.” You will get additional personal e-mails, or we can hold conferences as necessary with regard to my (and your) additional comments and questions.

In the meantime, here are some responses to the outlines I now have. Have your outline before you as you read them. If any of the comments seem to apply to your outline yours was probably one of those I had in mind.

Titles and Theses. Exactly half of the outlines I now have contain no “title,” “topic,” statement of “thesis,” or “purpose,” for your paper. (Of course, not all are necessary, but you should have had at least one of them.) Sometimes this is merely an oversight. More often, in my experience, it reveals a measure of lack of focus or purpose on the part of the writer. (I'm always reminded, in this context, of the title of my college freshman English textbook: Writing With a Purpose.) If this applies to you, please review “Research Papers Process,” on our seminar’s Web site [].

Length. Outlines will not be graded –  to use the old law professor’s adage regarding blue books –  by throwing them down a flight of stairs to see which ones go the furthest. On the other hand, the purpose of these outlines was for you to have done almost all of your research and analysis – at a minimum, enough to provide yourself sufficient detail regarding that analysis, organization, content and references to make the actual writing more a matter of “fill in the blanks” than starting from scratch. Those of you who have outlines in the 5-9 page length are probably going to find yourselves in better shape in this regard than those with 1-3 page outlines. Because the outlining process is designed to save you time and effort, rather than the reverse, I would urge those of you with the shorter outlines to expand them now rather than going right to writing something that may, as a result, take you much longer and require a lot more revision.

Headings and Subheads. Words like “Introduction,” “Body,” and “Conclusion,” while possibly appropriate to a template for outlines, communicate very little to the reader (or, in this case, the writer) when used in an outline for a specific paper. Everything above regarding “topics,” etc., is equally applicable to your headings and subheads. Only slightly better are headings that point to an area or category, but not to the reasons for their existence in the paper, or the point that they are there to make. Examples would be headings such as “background,” “history,” or “ethical considerations.” What is it about the history, or ethics, that makes this section of the paper relevant to your thesis? Such headings may (but not necessarily always) indicate that your paper is a little heavy on the descriptions (i.e., what I call “journalism”) and a little light on the analysis (i.e., what I’ve referred to, in paragraph 3 of "Topic Selection," above, as "a law school paper").

Research. Some of you provided very little by way of indication of the research you have already done – references in the text, endnotes, bibliographies, case names, law review articles, or whatever. As indicated before, most of your research should have been done during the month of September and reflected in this outline.

Style/Format. It’s no big deal; whatever works for you is fine. But just so you know, the usual progression in an outline is from Roman (i.e., I, II, III, etc.) to caps (i.e., A, B, C, etc.), to Arabic (i.e., 1, 2, 3, etc.), to small (i.e., a, b, c, etc.).

Hope this is helpful.

Subject and Presentation. Clearly, the most important thing about your paper is the appropriateness of the subject you have chosen, the substantive contribution it can make, and the quality of your presentation of that subject. For the most part, these aspects were addressed in the creation, and review, of your outlines. At this point, I believe each paper satisfies these requirements. They will, individually, and as a group, be a valuable resource for those in the (now, October 23, 2001) 105 countries who are regularly hitting on this Web site. Thus, for the most part my editing, our conferences, and this memo will deal with matters concerning writing as such.

What I Have Done. For each of you, what I have done is a fairly detailed edit of something between a quarter and a half of your paper -- depending on its length.

Why I Have Done It. As I've often said, when you graduate from law school you don't get a tractor or a set of dental implements. All you take with you into your practice of law are your verbal skills: your ability to listen, speak, read and write. These are the abilities that will contribute to your success -- and therefore that of your clients -- more than anything else.

Ironically, the handicap suffered by most if not all of you is your very brilliance and facility -- when compared with that of your classmates in high school and college. You were so darn good that you could dash off a paper the night before it was due, hand it in virtually unread or proof read, and get it back with an "A" on it (and no suggestions for revision). Ego-boosting at the time, this treatment did you a real disservice.

Professional writing -- like professional anything, such as football or music -- requires seemingly unlimited hours of practice and rehearsal. A professional musician who has written the music she is going to perform, and who has performed it in concert dozens of times, may play it over a hundred times or more before the next concert. An actor will "run lines," and attend rehearsals, to perform, and perform again, roles she has played many times before. A football player does not just execute a block once, get a grade on it from the coach, and progress to the task of the tackle. He will do it over, and over, and over again until he can do it with perfection each time.

Do you know where Tiger Woods can be found after a championship round of golf? He's not drinking in the club house. He's out on the practice range, hitting more balls, further perfecting his swing.

So it is with writing. From now on. For you.

No longer is it something you do once. Or twice. It's something you do over and over again, just like every other professional has to do with their skills.

I want you to experience, to practice, the skills of rewriting and proof reading. I want you to be able to write, and to edit, to the standards of the most exacting law firms in America.

In my paper, "So You Want to be a Lawyer: A Play in Four Acts," I repeat the identical stories told me by two of my most brilliant and conscientious colleagues, members of our law school faculty. Each had the experience in two different law firms, firms ranked among our nation's finest, of having their written work rejected by a senior partner. Because of a single typo on the first page of a memo the partner literally threw it back across the desk at them. The standard was perfection and they hadn't met it.

I want you to be able to meet that standard. I don't want you to have your work thrown back at you -- or worse -- because of your inability to write to the standards of professionals.

And I want you to begin with your paper in this seminar.

What You Are to Do With What I've Given Back to You. As I've explained in our conferences, the point of my editing your paper is not to say that you have "failed," or "done a lousy job." Nor is it to say that the changes I have made are the "right" way to express what you are trying to say and that the way you've done it is the "wrong" way. Indeed, as I've told many of you, if you just copy what I did verbatim that's probably points off. Had I read over and edited each of your papers again undoubtedly I would have rejected some of my own first edits. In no event am I imposing any "rules" on you. I don't know any anyway. Mine are the reactions of but one reader/editor who cares about you and whose ultimate goal is to have you look as good as possible to the world when your work goes up on the Web and for you to be as well prepared for a rewarding law practice as possible.

No, the point simply is to illustrate for you some of the range of options you have in expressing an idea; to get you to think on your own about such options when you write, and rewrite. What I want to see in your "final, final draft" is how you think your writing can be improved -- throughout your entire paper -- not how I thought it could be improved (or done differently).

Sometimes there were "errors," such as leaving a word out of a sentence, or capitalizing something that normally would not be capitalized. But for the most part that's not what I was trying to call to your attention.

So as you read through and edit your paper a number of times look for:

• Grammatical errors.

• Words that are spelled correctly (that is, your word processor's spell checker didn't catch them) but are clearly not the words you want.

• Phrasing that is ambiguous.

• Generalizations that need examples to communicate clearly.

• Concepts, or labels, that are explained later in the paper but unknown to the reader when first used.

• Paragraphs that would read better if broken into two or more paragraphs.

• Sentences that are, unintentionally, incomplete.

• Sentences that are way, way too long, and would benefit from being broken up.

• Inconsistency in tense, voice or person.

• Words such as "recently" that may be confusing to someone reading your paper seven years from now.

• Errors in Blue Book citation form.

Page Limits and Lean Writing.

There are page minimums associated with various levels of writing and academic credit. I will not repeat them here except to note, as mentioned elsewhere on this site, that they are exclusive of endnotes/footnotes. That is why, among other things, you were requested to submit your paper with endnotes rather than the footnotes that make it impossible to count pages of text.

It is, of course, possible to not meet those minimums. Or to so pad a paper with large font, wide margins, and excessive quoted material as to make it ineligible for the page minimum credit.

Having avoided that, however, once your "first final draft" demonstrates a good faith satisfaction of the page length requirements they are -- so far as I am concerned -- no longer relevant during the stages of revision.

So, at this point, another of the requirements in your editing -- as illustrated by some of the edits I did on each of your papers -- is to make your writing as lean as possible. As I explained to some of you, I have been writing a column for the local paper on K-12 education issues every two weeks for the past three years. My requirement was to put what I had to say into something between 647 and 649 words. That meant that every time I added a word or phrase I would have to take that much out. It proved to be a useful exercise in lean writing.

Don't go to extremes. Keep your text understandable. But try to take a look at every word in every sentence and ask yourself if it could be removed (a) without harming the content, and (b) possibly making it even more clear. If so, delete it.

Quotes.

When do you put quoted material in the text of your paper and when in a note? As with everything else from me there is no rule. But think about the following.

• To the maximum extent possible the paper should be your ideas and expression not quotes from others.

• Having met the page minimums, you now want to make your paper as short and readable as possible. Does the additional quote contribute to, or detract from, a reader's desire to continue reading your paper?

• A quote in the text needs to be "set up." Who said it? When and why? Why are you quoting, rather than paraphrasing, it? How does it support what you have been saying? Some of you occasionally simply inserted something inside quotation marks with no explanation whatsoever in the surrounding text.

• A quote ought to be an especially skillful or colorful turn of phrase, pithy and insightful, a statement from some well-known (and relevant) person, or language that needs to be precisely quoted from its source, such as a phrase from a statute or a quotable holding from a court opinion. If it's a lengthy quote from a statute, or a string of facts, consider paraphrasing a couple of examples, or the most important portion, and then put the full quote, with its source, in an endnote.

Additional Conferences.

As I've said to most of you, we have both (a) minimums for writing and academic credit, and (b) what you and I are willing to do above and beyond that.

Once you've submitted (a) a draft of the minimum length, (b) a rewrite, (c) we've held a conference, and (d) you've made an oral presentation, the minimums are met.

Above and beyond that, I'm willing to meet with you, look over intermediate drafts, or anything else you find helpful that is consistent with 24-hour days and my obligations to my other students in Law of Electronic Media. Such additional efforts on your part will not, as such, affect your grade -- only insofar as they produce a better end product. So it is, in no sense, a "requirement." Just an offer.

Writing Center.

Now that you have submitted a work that is entirely yours, you are free to get assistance from anywhere you can find it. You are certainly not only permitted, but encouraged, to utilize the services of the Writing Center if you are so inclined. You might, however, want to share with them a printout of this Web page and a copy of the section of your paper showing my edits just to give them some guidance as to what I have in mind.

Web Page Publication of Your Paper.

Don't worry yourself at this point with what will happen to your paper next. Learning how to write in HTML, or otherwise construct Web pages, is not a requirement of this seminar. I am (usually) able to do whatever needs to be done to post your paper with at least minimally acceptable appearance. (You can look at prior years' Web-posted papers to get an idea of what yours will look like.) Of course, if you do know how to create Web pages (or just "Save As" your paper as HTML) that will give you a greater opportunity to shape its appearance for the world.

And, as with most everything else, while it will not affect your grade, to the extent I have the time, and you have the desire, I am happy to share with you what little I know about Web page creation. (It's really quite easy. At least the basics.) I enjoy playing with this stuff anyway and would be happy to have you play along if you want.

For now, just concentrate on making your paper the best you can and plan on getting it to me on an IBM-compatible-formatted floppy disk with whatever graphics or other files you want included with it (if any).

Conclusion.

Try to have some fun with this stage. You'll all over the hump, and it's still a month until Thanksgiving break! Doesn't that feel good? Now you can experience the joys of working with your words like a potter works with clay. Make me a work of art -- with arguments that hold water.

It's due November 7, 2001; let's say by 4:00 p.m. in Jessie's office.