Antonin Scalia in judicial mode.
The online ABA Journal includes this quotation from Associate Justice Antonin Scalia‘s recent speech to a gathering of the American Society of Legal Writers:
It became clear to me [while an instructor at U. Va. law school], as I think it must become to clear to anyone who is burdened with the job of teaching legal writing, that what these students lacked was not the skill of legal writing, but the skill of writing at all. To tell the truth, at as late a stage as law school, I doubt this skill can be taught.
What I hoped to have conveyed to my charges in those years were merely the prerequisites for self-improvement in writing, which are two things. Number one, the realization—and it occurred to my students as an astounding revelation – that there is an immense difference between writing and good writing. And two, that it takes time and sweat to convert the former into the later.
The snippet reminded Blawgletter of a comment from a judge friend on the elegant concurrence on August 14 by Senior Circuit Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. His Honor compared Judge Noonan’s style to that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Dead on, we say. Good writing is good writing — even when it wears legal garb.
