Legal Writing – Theme is Heart of Your Writing

As “literary lawyers” who learn from the best fiction and nonfiction writing techniques, we should keep in mind the lively importance of theme in our writing. This recent law-lit piece delves deeper into the meaning of theme and how to develop meaningful themes in your legal writing: theme heart of legal writing

Better Beginnings in Legal Writing

Looking for ways to inspire your legal writing? How do you keep your legal reader’s attention? What makes the best “fact” sections stand out in legal writing? Three words: character, conflict and arch. We consider these storytelling techniques to achieve enticing, compelling beginnings in my recent Law & Literature article from The Columbus Bar’s “Lawyer’s Quarterly.

https://issuu.com/columbusbarlawyersquarterly/docs/cblqfall2018/6

 

 

Best Lawyers, Best Writers

storyThe best lawyers are the best writers. Such lawyers command the technical and professional skills required of all legal writers, while also deploying the sometimes subtle tools of narrative nonfiction and novel writers. Those writer’s tools include a sense of character, conflict and story arch that drive all moving stories. The tools also involve story structure, plot development, and scene setting, among others. Yet those tools are rarely taught in law school legal writing courses. Law & Literature seeks to highlight the usefulness and enjoyment of storytelling for legal writers, without sacrificing the professional, ethical and technical sophistication required of the best legal writing.  Let us all strive to become better “legal storytellers.”

Law-Lit: Telling Better “Legal Stories”

images-2A winning legal argument works much like a compelling story. So much so, in fact, that we might say their overlapping functions follow their shared forms. These underlying forms are by no means equivalent, but their matching anatomy reveals how both good stories and good lawyers win us over.

Let’s take story first. What makes a riveting story? At least five essentials:

  1. Setting: selected details to create a story world that invokes our senses and suspends our disbelief
  2. Character: people who engender our empathy, who want or need, who struggle, and who change through conflict
  3. Structure: conflict-driven and causally connected events that culminate in success or failure for the characters
  4. Theme: a moral premise or underlying message about how we should live our lives
  5. Style: the artist’s stamp of skill, creativity, and expertise that lends to the story’s believability

Now compare the essentials of legal argument, broadly speaking. What ingredients yield the most persuasive legal positions?images-1

  1. Details: selected facts to invoke our senses relevant to the legal dispute, or what we call “legally relevant facts”
  2. Motives: parties in the legal dispute must engender our empathy – we must understand their needs, wants, and goals
  3. Coherence: conflict-driven legal reasoning (i.e., legal argument) coupled with story to create “narrative-driven argument”
  4. Theme: a moral premise or underlying message about how we should live our lives
  5. Credibility: the lawyer’s believability, stemming from skill, practical wisdom, knowledge, and expertise

As we see, these two structures track one another in meaningful ways:

  • Details – Setting: we select the right details to invoke the senses and create a believable, engaging world
  • Motive – Character: we engender empathy for the struggling people at the center of this conflicted world
  • Coherence – Structure: the conflict resolves through striving, confrontation, and change
  • Theme – Theme: moral underpinning that gives larger meaning and connection to us
  • Credibility – Style: skill, expertise, and credibility show in the work, the work of a professional who cares

imagesNot a perfect overlap, by any means, but surely one worthy of our further study and reflection. The key differences, too, deserve our attention. This is yet another law-lit mission for us – to improve our understanding and practice of both law and literature by exploring their fundamental forms. These forms might help us tell better “legal stories” to serve our clients and the legal system, never failing our overarching duty to truthfulness and justice.

Law-Lit’s Mission: Imagination, Emotion, Story

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  1. We revive our moral imaginations and intellectual empathy to compliment legal reason as a path to solving law’s problems.
  2. We engage our emotional and intuitive faculties as foundations for sound judgments in law.
  3. We discover storytelling, along with fiction and nonfiction techniques, as routes to understanding law and better writing in the legal profession.
  4. We aim to become more adept with stories, reading, and writing to enhance communication and persuasion.
  5. We seek to ethically attune ourselves to the rewards and challenges of a fulfilling career – if not a calling – in the law.

3 Reasons We Need Law and literature

  • To do Justice!  “That’s not my job, my job is to apply the law,” famously retorted Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hence the conventional view of law: we apply known rules to guide conduct and make results predictable. Justice is secondary, if it concerns us at all. But this view disappoints, leaves us cold. We need to commit ourselves to seeking justice. We need a live debate about fairness and reason in law. We share responsibility for justice, not to hide behind our professional masks, our lawyerly jargon, and our habitual responses to legal problems. We should not leave justice to lawyers only, certainly not of the Holmes variety, but should include other voices. Literature offers many wise voices. We should listen to them.
  • To know injustice. Stories focus on particular, concrete instances of injustice. It is easier to know injustice than justice. Broad legal generalizations and rules can seem vapid, incomplete by comparison. Exposing ourselves vicariously through literature to concrete harm, loss and unfairness refines our sense of injustice. Such exposure tests our general legal propositions. And it prompts us to imagine how law might change to rectify injustice. Telling stories can ignite our moral imaginations.
  • To stop cruel formalism. Forms used to seek justice can themselves be infected with cruelties and frailties that produce injustice. We must examine our legal system’s penchant for formulaic, pat approaches to legal problems. We must counter consistency, predictability and efficiency with the realities – if not virtues – of flux and uncertainty at the core of most efforts to seek justice. This is not to deny the preeminent values of our legal system, but rather to embrace the humility that should accompany our various legal forms, procedures and rules. Literature can chasten and instruct us.

See Outside The Law: Narratives on Justice in America by Susan Richard Shreve and Porter Shreve, Editors (Beacon Press Boston, 1997) (My summary above draws from and distills the book’s introduction by Martha Minow).