Note: This page may be expanded as the semester progresses and the mileposts approach. The first milepost, Wednesday, September 4, involves topic selection. -- N.J. August 21, 2002 [revised 20020928; 20021114].

Pre-Research and Topic Selection

All Documents Basics

Outlining

Reactions to Outlines

Reactions to First Final Drafts

Web Page Publication of Your Paper

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 a current practice, encouraging new legislation?

1. Before you can begin to think about a topic you will need to do some surveying, reading -- what I call "pre-research." What's hot these days? What interests you? What are your options out there? A topic is not something you can pluck out of the air 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. Go back and look at the "Introduction: Purpose" section of the seminar "Overview and General Information" page. What you're looking for, ideally, is some innovative new way that law students in general, and you in particular, can earn a living with the use of your law degree and legal skills; something other than the traditional "law practice" with contingent fee or hourly billing. Failing that, as you'll see from reviewing prior papers, you can investigate and report on an aspect of some existing innovative approach to funding lawyers, or even old traditional means.

3. 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.

4. 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 issues involved in using a Web page to market your legal services or otherwise practice law. 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 such a proposal would involve "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.

5. The "research" phase of your paper begins with your thinking about potential topics and continues throughout the final tweaking of your "final, final" draft.

Here are some requests and hopefully helpful suggestions about research.

(a) Teach yourself, and apply, perfect Blue 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 resource; among its billions of documents may well be 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; your cites become sites, enabling the reader not only to have a reference to your source, but to instantaneously get access to the full text of the source material itself.

(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 that are not already listed in our ELP02 Bibliography.

The following basics are provided, full well knowing that they will produce reactions from some readers along a continuum between uproarious laughter at one end and resentment at being insulted at the other. "Don't you know everybody is born knowing this stuff?" they cry.

So why is it here? Because, in my experience, everybody is not born knowing this stuff. Indeed, over a half of most seminar participants overlook one, more, or all of the following requests/suggestions.

Whether you're writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States, a memo to a senior partner or client, a "memo to the file," a record of an expenditure, even an entry in your personal journal/diary -- or the topic statements, outlines, and drafts for this seminar -- it's useful to keep the following in mind when identifying your document.

The form you chose to use, even where you put the information (e.g., beginning or end, top or bottom of page, left margin or centered), is not as crucial as that it be present somewhere within your document (unless the court, or your law firm, has a style manual you are to follow; I do not). Provide the information in the way that you find the most aesthetically pleasing and least awkward.

This is not only important when providing a document to others, it's equally or more important when it will only be seen by you. At the time you are preparing a document you know what it is. Presumably it's fairly important to you. Assuming you only have two or three things you're working on at the same time it's relatively easy to distinguish among them. However, when you're working with hundreds of matters at various stages of completion, or come upon a given document weeks or years later, you may not know what it is, or how it's distinguished from others.

For the person receiving your document, such problems are only multiplied. Such persons not only have all your unidentified documents, they have all the unidentified documents of numerous others.

Is this merely an obsessive-compulsive attention to detail? That's how it's seen by the many persons who not only resist, but actually resent, having to comply. But it turns out that one of the requirements of professionalism in every profession is precisely that kind of compulsive attention to detail. And law school is, at least in some part, designed to assist students in the development of such habits of mind and work. Hopefully, these explanations why such details are important may make it easier to attend to them.

Date. When was this document prepared? (1) You may want to file, and subsequently find, documents chronologically. (2) If other identifying information was omitted, the date may help you recreate it later. (3) It may constitute, if not proof, at least some evidence that a deadline was met. (4) It will, of course, help the recipient of your document even more in these ways.

Subject identification. What is this document? (1) The title. The name of your short story -- or, in this case, the "working title" of your seminar paper. (2) The category. Is it a brief, a pleading, an opinion letter? For this seminar, is it a topic statement, an outline, a first final, or final final draft?

Recipient and purpose. For what stage of what court proceeding -- or what assignment for what course and professor -- was this prepared?

Author/s. You know that you wrote the document you hold in your hand. The recipient may not know. You may not know years from now. Put your name, or at least your initials, on everything you write. If there are multiple authors, or other contacts relative to the document, you might want to include (or at least attach to your own copy if it's inappropriate to put it in the main text) the names and coordinates of those whom you may need or want to contact later with regard to this item. They might include clients, lawyers, phone numbers of court clerks, or whatever.

Draft number. Most good writing goes through at least a half dozen or more rewrites. (1) As you've probably already discovered, it's useful to save and backup each draft as you go through this process -- if for no other reason than when the inevitable computer crash occurs you're not starting over from scratch. (2) Having numbered drafts, when you come upon a hard copy of one you no longer need to wonder if it's the latest one, the one you're currently working on, or not. (3) This may be especially helpful for the recipient, to know whether what they're reading has already been mailed, or published, or whether it's been given to them for comments and editing -- and, if so, whether it's a draft they've already seen or a later one.

Page numbers. Whether you start numbering from page one, or only from the second page, number your pages. (1) Especially if it is a substantial document of loose pages; if it's dropped, or the pages are otherwise mixed up, putting them back in order can be a bit frustrating. (Of course, this might also be a reason for considering a staple!) (2) Sometimes you will have inadvertently omitted pages from the document. Having them numbered makes it easier for you, and the recipient, to figure that out. (3) You may sometimes want to use a running header or footer -- that is, a group of words at the top or bottom of the page that may, for example, include your name and other brief information about the document along with the page number.

Label floppies. If you submit (or save for your own use) a document on a floppy disk, put a label on it. The label need not be designed for the purpose, or neatly typed. But it should contain at least your name and date and maybe a summary version of the document's title and other information listed above. The reasons for doing so, of course, are for the most part identical to those for hard copy documents -- maybe more so; you can at least figure out something by staring at a hard copy document; blank floppies are much less revealing of their contents.

File names. Try to make file names somewhat unique. For example, if one or more students submit floppy (or e-mail) copies of documents with filenames such as "outline.doc," and they are copied by the recipient into a single directory, they may actually over-write each other. At a minimum, it will be somewhere between impossible and very difficult to figure out, without opening the files, which is whose. Consider, for example, using something like "ELPABout.doc" to represent (a) Economics of Law Practice, (b) from Able Baker, who is submitting his (c) outline. Obviously, as always, the precise form is not as important -- either for you or the recipient -- as that you provide filenames with at least some tie to you and the nature of the document.

1. As I will mention in one of our early seminar sessions, if you go about this outlining 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."

Here are some responses to outlines I have received in prior years. You might want to read these over now, and again once you have a fairly complete version of your outline. At that point, if any of these comments seem to apply to your outline you have a chance to avoid their applicability to the one you ultimately hand in.

Titles and Theses. Sometimes as many as half of the outlines I get contain no “title,” “topic,” statement of “thesis,” or “purpose,” for the paper. (Of course, not all are necessary, but you should have 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.”

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 is 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. The outlining process is designed to save participants time and effort, rather than the reverse. If your outline is a little sketchy at this point, I would strongly urge you to take the time to expand it now rather than going right to the writing of something that may, as a result, take you much longer, require a lot more revision -- or even be abandoned entirely.

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, even the writer) when used in an outline for a specific paper. Everything above regarding “topics” 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 outlines provide very little indication of the research that has been 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 be 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.). If you care to use it, most word processing programs contain an outline feature; once you choose the format you want the program applies it automatically, enabling you to move entire portions of your outline from one place to another without having to renumber everything.

Hope this is helpful.

As with my probable reactions to outlines, above, here are some comments I've shared with past participants regarding their first final drafts.

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. Your papers, individually, and as a group, will be a valuable resource for those in the (now, August 21, 2002) 125 countries who are regularly hitting on this Web site. For the most part, the substantive aspects of your papers were addressed in the creation, and review, of your outlines. Thus, for the most part these comments deal with the writing as such.

What I Will Do. For each of you, I will do a fairly detailed edit of something between a quarter and a half of your paper -- depending on its length.

Why I Do It. 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 many law students is their very brilliance and facility -- when compared with that of their 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 your professional writing.

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 proof reading, and then rewriting, your own material. 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 Will Give Back to You. As I will explain again in our one-on-one 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 participants in the past, if you just copy my edits of your paper verbatim that's probably points off. Had I read over and edited each of your papers one more time 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, 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 done differently.

Sometimes there are "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 will be 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, abreviations, or labels, that are explained later in the paper but unknown to the reader when first used.

• Paragraphs that need a topic sentence, or 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 are requested to submit your paper with endnotes. (Footnotes obviously 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 is to make your writing as lean as possible. When writing op ed columns I sometimes need to put what I have to say into something between 647 and 649 words. Every time I add a word or phrase I have to take that much out. It's 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? An occasional participant's paper will have something simply inserted inside quotation marks with no explanation whatsoever in the surrounding text.

• A quote ought to be an especially skillful or colorful turn of phrase, or pithy and insightful, or a relevant statement from some well-known 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 or even appendix (or link to it).

Additional Conferences.

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, family and colleagues. 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.

Once you have submitted a work that is entirely yours, you are free to get assistance not only from me but 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.

Although Web-publication of your paper is a requirement of this seminar, learning how to write in HTML, or otherwise construct Web pages, is not. I am (usually) able to do whatever needs to be done to post your paper with at least minimally acceptable appearance.

What I will, and won't, do to improve the formatting of your paper. To help you understand the formatting process, here are some of the steps I go through. (1) Assuming I get your paper in electronic form (i.e., either on a floppy, or as an attachment to an e-mail) in MS Word, or comparable word processor format, I do a "Save As" in "text" format. (2) I then bring it up in that format, block and copy (or "Select All") text and notes, go to Netscape and "open," "new," and "blank page," change the font in Netscape to Ariel 14, and paste. (In my experience, other procedures may result in removing the note calls, deleting the endnotes entirely, or otherwise modifying the paper.) (3) This carries over the note calls, and the endnotes. However, it removes spacing between paragraphs, any italics, bold, or other formatting of that sort. (4) I usually center and increase the font on the title and your name, and any other heading material. (5) Spaces are inserted between paragraphs and after subheadings. (6) Horizontal lines are inserted between the headings and beginning text (or table of contents), between the text and beginning of endnotes, and at the end. (7) With "format," "page colors and properties," at least some metatags are inserted. (These are the name given your paper at the top of the screen when someone is looking at it, plus your name, and a brief description, and key words, that search engines like Google use when responding to someone's search request.)

None of the above takes all that long. What takes longer, and I normally do not have the time to do, is the preparation of "targets" and "links" from, for example, your table of contents or each of your note calls. Targets and links mean that a reader can click on your note call and be taken immediately to your endnote; clicking "back" then takes them back to where they were in the text. Ditto for headings and subheadings in your table of contents that can take readers to those sections of your paper. Ditto for the preparation (and then testing and confirming) of the links you can create from the URL references in your endnotes (that will enable a reader to merely click on your cited URL (i.e., the "http://www . . .") in order to go to the actual document you are citing). Ditto for pictures, charts, graphs, Power Point slides, or the necessary preparation of what HTML calls "tables" -- unless they can be done quickly and easily. This kind of tweaking, and the numerous other things that can be done to fancy up a Web page document, need not take all that much time for an individual paper; I usually do it for papers of mine that I post to the Web. But it does become a pretty time-consuming undertaking if one is doing all the papers for a seminar.

So you have the following options: (1) accept what I am able to do with formatting your paper, (2) do it all yourself and present me with the paper in the precise form you'd like to see it uploaded to the Web site, or (3) come see me for some simple instruction in how you can do at least some of this yourself, or work along with me in my office on it. (To the extent I have the time I am always 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.)

You can look at prior years' Web-posted papers to get an idea of what others have done with their papers.

Please understand that none of this affects your grade -- just the way in which you present yourself to the world of Internet users who may happen upon (or be directed by you to) your paper.

For now, just concentrate on making your paper the best you can and plan on ultimately 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 paper. You, too, 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.