Legal Usage: A Modern Style Guide

Legal Usage A Modern Style Guide is a clear, unambiguous guide to good legal usage. It highlights the techniques that legal writers in the common law tradition need for effective, compelling and readable legal writing. The easy-to-use layout facilitates ready understanding of best practice for legal vocabulary and drafting style. It adopts a plain language approach to legal writing, in line with modern practice.

Legal Usage A Modern Style Guide is a clear and easy-to-use guide to legal writing for common law countries

Style guides abound for general writing; but for legal writing they are rare—especially for British, Australian and other Commonwealth lawyers. This book fills that gap. It highlights the techniques that legal writers in the common law tradition need for effective, compelling and readable legal writing. 

Some modern legal writing is fresh, gracious, and enticing; to read it is a delight. But other modern legal writing is stale, turgid, and often unclear; to read it is a chore. This book examines the techniques that distinguish one style from the other. It distils the methods for making modern legal writing powerful and persuasive, while remaining poised, polished, and legally effective.

The book is organised alphabetically by topic, and is cross-referenced to related concepts. The author cites hundreds of usage examples from leading judges in Commonwealth jurisdictions. 

Simple plain language alternatives are offered for numerous technical terms and foreign-language phrases, with supporting examples from judgments and texts.

Features

• Clear and unambiguous explanations
• Comprehensive coverage of writing techniques
• Plentiful examples supported by judicial writing
• Reliable and authoritative
• Provides confidence in legal writing and drafting
• Easy to follow and understand