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Legal Usage: A Modern Style Guide

Legal Usage: A Modern Style Guide

Author: Peter Butt
Publisher: LexisNexis Australia
ISBN: 9780409341461
Published In: November 2017
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: International ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

HKD 480.60

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Description
Contents
Author

Details

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

Topics include:

organising material logically
adding impact to sentences
being gender-neutral while remaining idiomatic
minimising ambiguity
using provisos and recitals
breaking complex material into digestible chunks
paragraphing effectively
punctuating properly
managing definitions
reducing prolixity
making headings count
using (or avoiding) terms of art and Latin phrases
avoiding fussy drafting
drafting in generalities
avoiding noun-strings and passives
testing documents for readability
using readability studies
using humour in legal writing

This innovative and authoritative guide is an essential reference for lawyers, legislative drafters, decision-makers, students, in-house counsel, and anyone charged with preparing effective legal material.

Peter Butt is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Sydney and a prodigious author on land law and legal drafting. He is admitted as a lawyer in Australia, and is an honorary member of the Inner Temple (UK). He is a member of the Commonwealth Association of Legal Counsel (CALC), and was the foundation director of the Centre for Plain Legal Language at the University of Sydney. He is a past President of Clarity, an international organisation encouraging the use of plain language in law. In addition to other books, he co-edited the first edition of Butterworth’s Australian Legal Dictionary, and has edited several editions of the LexisNexis Concise Australian Legal Dictionary.