The Supreme Court is a liberal body–when it comes to legal writing

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the A BA Journals Lee Rawles. And today I’m joined by Jill Barton, author of the new book, the Supreme Guide to Writing. Jill, thanks so much for joining us.

Jill Barton:

It’s a pleasure to be here, Lee. Thanks for having me.

Lee Rawles:

So right off the top, can you give people an idea about who you are and how you came to write the book and then we’ll talk about your research methods.

Jill Barton:

Oh, happy to. So I started out as a journalist. I wanted to be a lawyer for as long as I can remember. My parents told me when I was very young, as I think many people here, that you’re very argumentative. And so I always wanted to go to law school and I went to undergraduate with the idea of getting that pre-law degree, which of course didn’t exist. And I was at the University of Missouri and one of my professors suggested that I try out for the student newspaper, which is called the Man Eat, and it’s a well-known newspaper. And I really got hooked on journalism through a 10 year journalism career. I really came to depend on the Associated Press style book, which as you probably know, Lee has answers to all kinds of questions about word choice and punctuation. If any little tiny detail about a comma or a word choice, you can go to that AP Bible and find an answer.

And so when I got into the law, I shifted to the law about 10 years later. There was no AP style book. And what was worse was I figured out quickly that I couldn’t really depend on it. And there’s many examples of where legal writing differs from journalistic style writing. One example came to light a few years ago in Maine when there was an overtime law written without a serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma. And the Associated Press style book says You should not use a serial comma. And most journalists do not. Most newspapers do not. But in Maine, the legislative drafting manuals also said you should not use a serial. And there was a law that described exemptions to overtime pay. And it was confusing because it didn’t have the serial. And it led to years of litigation, a lawsuit and appeal eventually a $5 million settlement, all because this serial wasn’t there.

And that guide that instructed lawmakers not to use the serial cited seven other writing manuals. So this was a very frustrating thing for me as a writing professor. I want to get things right, I want to teach my students how to write correctly. And I noticed after reading a few Supreme Court opinions at the time, that every instance that they could, that justices used the serial comma. So from then on, every time I had a grammar question, instead of going to one of the many, many writing books I had on my shelves, I would just look through a few Supreme Court opinions and ask myself, what does Chief Justice Roberts do in an instance like this? Or what does Justice Elena Kagan do in an instance like that? And that is where the book started and it ended last year, five years later after a five year study of 10,000 pages where I compiled with the help of some wonderful assistants, a file for each justice so we could really look at how each justice treats what I think are the more interesting or more important or even maybe more controversial points of grammar and style.

And that’s what the book is. It’s describing the majority or even unanimous rule on important points of grammar and style.

Lee Rawles:

And we are going to get into some of your more interesting findings. But one thing I think is so helpful about the book you’ve put together is you did not try and go back. There are books we have, Brian Garner is a columnist for the A BH Journal and his research into historical legal writing. So helpful. What I love about the Supreme Guide to Writing itself is it’s a slim useful book now, but I also think it will serve as a great snapshot in time because you have basically looked at, alright, what are the justices choosing when it comes to punctuation and writing choices right now? And I think to myself, generations from now when we’re going back, we’re looking at various decisions that might be very useful information for future legal scholars to have. Oh, well so and so usually used an Oxford comma when they meant this to have an Oxford comma. So maybe we can make a deduction about their reasoning here. Is that something you thought about as you’re putting together this guide?

Jill Barton:

I didn’t think about it as much when I was putting it together, but the Pulver v United States case that came down earlier this year brought to light an issue, which is in that opinion, the justices talked about how congress often confuses the words. That’s what that case kind of came down to. It was about sentencing guidelines, but it really came down to the meaning of the word and whether and means and or whether and means or, and of course that seems like it should be an easy answer, but it wasn’t was a case that reached the Supreme Court. And in that case, justice Gorsuch wrote about how Congress has often confused the meaning of, and so they look back at that historically. So I do think that historical look at how the justice is right, how they treat quotations that they pull from other cases is going to be helpful.

Lee Rawles:

Some of the maxims that used to seem absolute in legal writing, Antonin Scalia really was looked at for a very long time as, okay, well we’ll go to him and we’ll see what does he do? And there are examples now of justices moving away from that. And here I’m mostly thinking about contractions, so can’t instead of cannot wheel instead of we will things of that nature. And as you point out, Scalia himself did sprinkle a couple contractions in his very latest opinions, but could you talk about how the thinking around contractions seems to have changed?

Jill Barton:

Sure. The thinking around contractions has definitely changed fairly dramatically just in the last few years. And it really does come down to Justice Scalia. He did, as you noted, use a few contractions near the end of his life. However, he also called contractions intellectually abominable. And while he was on the court, no justice ever put a contraction in a majority opinion. Justice Salina Kagan had said many, many years ago when Justice Scalia was still alive that she only would use a contraction occasionally in a minority opinion, so a dissent or a concurrence because some of her colleagues don’t like them. I think she was probably talking about Justice Scalia. And what’s interesting is Justice Scalia’s successor, Neil Gorsuch came onto the court and with his very first opinion, and as you probably know, the first opinion assigned to the new justice is always something really boring.

It’s going to be short, it’s going to be unanimous. And Justice Neil Gorsuch was supposed to address the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which is a very dense topic, but he did not let that dense topic really dampen his style. And in the opening paragraph he used a contraction and he also used very casual language. That opening paragraph begins with him describing the issue, and then he says, there’s the contraction, that’s the nub of the dispute now before us. And he used that contraction in an opinion where every other justice signed on after many years, really a history of the court never using a contraction in the majority opinion at least. And he also used really casual words calling the debt collector a repo man. He also used the personal pronoun you I think 17 times in that opinion it was just a 10 or 11 page opinion, and that’s something his colleagues rarely did.

And just last term, we saw a 40% increase in the justices using the word you speaking directly to the readers. So Justice Gorsuch got some criticism for the way he was writing and kind of a more showy way at the beginning. There’s a hashtag Gorsuch style that went crazy on Twitter, but that died away and the criticism has died away. I think it was unfounded at the time because he’s an excellent writer. And now I believe many of the justices are following suit because all but one are using contractions regularly and they are all using the word you as well. And of course other casual style, which was true too with Justice Scalia who famously said pure applesauce in a descent. So he used casual language too, but it’s definitely become more casual in the last five years.

Lee Rawles:

As you said, you went through some 10,000 pages of opinion we like, and by we I just mean the American public who is aware of the Supreme Court and its decisions talk a lot about the justices along ideological lines when it comes to politics and policies. Do you see that reflected in their writing styles or is it more complicated than that? Do you think that there are justices who people would say are on ideologically different ends of the spectrum who actually are quite similar as writers?

Jill Barton:

There is a huge difference between the court’s political leanings and then how they write. In fact, I would argue the entire court is unabashedly liberal in how it’s writing today, especially compared to a few years ago. They’re using very casual language contractions, short sentences, short words, much more than a decade or a few decades ago. And most of the justices are very liberal embracing this modern progressive style justice. Clarence Thomas has talked for years about the value of using 10 cent words instead of a hundred dollars sentences and a hundred dollars words. And that is something we have really seen shine among most of the justices in the last few years, this much more progressive style where I believe they’re trying to speak more plainly to the American public and show us that we can talk and tackle these complicated legal subjects in plain language.

Lee Rawles:

I’m curious because you teach at the University of Miami, so you’re coming into contact every day with law students and you’re trying to guide them to be effective communicators among the legal community, but I imagine you also come into contact with plenty of people who’ve been practitioners for many years. Do you see a real difference in openness to accepting, like you said, a more modern style of language with your students than with practitioners? Or is there a relief from practitioners that, oh, maybe I can now write a little bit more similarly to how I speak.

Jill Barton:

I hope we see relief among practitioners and I hope lawyers can start to get away from that reputation that we are terrible writers. I think for the students that I teach, there’s a real disconnect in, for example, how they text with no capitalization, no punctuation in a very casual style with emojis versus how they think a lawyer writes. And we assign them these cases from the day one of law school with language from cases that are a hundred years old or older than that. So they’re reading this dense legal language and they think that is how lawyers write. That is the reputation of lawyers. When they’re starting to learn to write like a lawyer, they often try to adopt these big words instead of the simpler ones. I have to tell them, look, if you look at five years worth of Supreme Court opinions as I did, you will see that the justices used the word but versus however, nonetheless 10 to one or a hundred to one times.

And so it does take some convincing to tell my students that we need to write in a casual way just in the way you’re going to explain something. And the real challenge is that we’re talking about very complex legal topics and to boil them down to something that makes sense to teach a judge or to teach a jury about it, they have to use plain language. And it’s hard. It’s a challenge, which is why a lot of legal writing isn’t great because it takes time and it takes editing and all lawyers don’t have all the time to do all the editing in the world.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when you return. I’ll still be speaking with Jill Barton about our new book, the Supreme Guide to Writing. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, still here with Jill Barton, author of The Supreme Guide to Writing. So Jill, the first sum 70 pages of this book are just about punctuation, and here’s where I ask, where do you see the biggest pitfalls for lawyers, law students when it comes to punctuation?

Jill Barton:

One of the biggest challenges for any writer is commas. And the justices don’t give us a lot of help here because they don’t always follow traditional rules in regards to comma, chief Justice Roberts has talked about the importance of the cadence of his writing, about how important it is to bring the reader along at the pace that you want. And so he will use a comma with the word, but for example, in one sentence, in an opinion. And in that same opinion, he’ll have a sentence that’s similar length also with but used in a similar way, but without a comma. And it really comes down to cadence. So it is hard to teach a rule like that that we should think about how we would say a sentence and therefore add commas.

Lee Rawles:

And I have to say I am in the Cadence School. I have been employed as a professional copy editor, but much like cooking with garlic, the recipe may say two cloves, but what does my heart say? My heart says more garlic, and when it comes to commas, I’m like, where does my heart feel like a comma should be? So that can present a challenge.

Jill Barton:

It really can present a challenge. And for the new legal writer, of course, you can just follow the traditional rule and as you create more of an art fullness to your sentences, you can have a little bit more fun with it. As you see the justices do that, and they certainly do that. I mean with colons as well. The traditional rule used to be that you could only use a colon after a complete clause, the equivalent of a full sentence to set up a quote or so forth, and that’s just not the case anymore. That’s a rule we see in the elements of style of beloved books by STR and white, and that’s just not the way the justices write. And so we shouldn’t be necessarily writing like that as well. Another fun thing that you certainly see a lot among the justices is their use of periods. So they’ll use a period when they haven’t written a complete sentence. They have a lot of fun writing very pithy fragments to add a little punch to either a majority opinion, but more so in a descent typically.

Lee Rawles:

I do wonder, when you’re speaking to students, do you try and stress the school of you must learn what the official rules are so that later you can write more stylistically, more freeform. And I think about how they always say, well, Picasso trained as the draftsman and could draw very technically and then later decided to develop his own style. Do you think that once you reach the highest court in the land, it feels a little bit more like that as well, and perhaps that’s why they’re willing to break some of these rules?

Jill Barton:

Absolutely, and that’s what’s most fun about reading the justice’s opinion is how much fun they can have with language, how much they can play with what are the traditional rules. I show my students some of their best fragments each year, and the most common fragment in many opinions is the justices will write. So to here, and I always have a student in the second semester when we’re doing brief writing, use that sentence at some point they’ll describe an analysis or rationale and they’ll say so to here. And I say, now you can do that. You can add a fragment, but the rest of your brief must be so good that I know it’s not a grammatical mistake. And that’s the key. As long as our writing is clear enough that it’s not littered with apostrophe errors and grammatical mistakes, we can have a little bit more fun with language and use it in a way the same way that we speak in conversation.

Lee Rawles:

So you’re documenting what is essentially, it seems to be a period of transition in legal writing at the highest court of the land. So there is not one single guide that all the justices are working from. And you do make sure that you are alerting readers in the supreme guide to writing. While this is still kind of a divided opinion, this is unanimous. Could you talk about how you chose to do that and the wording that you use in the book to denote, Hey, this is a unanimous opinion or a majority opinion, things like that?

Jill Barton:

Sure. So part of what I wanted to do with the book was to end my frustration, which came from reading so many grammar books that would put out these grammar rules as if they were black letter law. You must do this as if there were these rigid rules you must follow. And I think what’s fun when we read the Supreme Court opinions is we see the justices have some fun with those rules. And in that sense we want to know what the rule should be that the justices most of the time use a comma, for example, with the conjunction butt, but then sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have a little bit more fun. Most of the time they use the word cannot, but a lot of times they use that contraction can’t. And then there’s just some other interesting choices, I’m sure you’ve gotten in grammar debates with people about this came up with how to make the possessive of Kamala Harris’s name.

Is it Harris or Harris S? And this is a debate within the Supreme Court that how do you make the possessive of a singular collective noun like Congress? Of course, they write about Congress a lot. Several of them always write Congress and several of them always write Congress s. And they’re so precise on that rule and how they want to follow it that if one of them uses Congress apostrophe without the S, but they’re quoting another justice who does it the other way, they will put it in quotes so they don’t mess up their paragraph with a different writing of Congress. That’s how much they adhere to the rule they see as correct. And I think it’s interesting to see, okay, look, these justices follow the apostrophe rule in this way and maybe you want to follow suit in that sense, but we can see some consistency among some of the rules and that’s helpful. But in the book, what I really wanted to do was show a more creative path to good writing, and it doesn’t have to follow the straight and narrow line of following some of these old fashioned rigid grammar rules like we learned in grammar school, I learned that I wasn’t supposed to end a sentence in a preposition, but then I see the justices do it. So now I want to end sentences in a preposition if the workaround is too wordy or complex.

Lee Rawles:

I think about journalistic writing much the same way. Is it clear if I follow a quote rule for grammar? Am I making this less clear to my reader? And I think that many times that has to be a lawyer or a judge’s perspective too, by following a principle, am I actually putting a stumbling block in front of my readers?

Jill Barton:

So the court definitely shows a keen interest in making its opinions clear and readable and making sure readers can understand exactly what it is they want to say. And you mentioned how the workaround can be so awkward, and Winston Churchill is famously quoted as talking about ending a sentence with prepositions, and he wrote, he said, this is the type of errant petry up with which I will not put. And that’s the perfect example of how awful a workaround can be if we’re trying to wrestle and adhere to these old grammar rules. So the court definitely, when it has a choice between fixing adhering to a grammar rule or writing something in a more plainspoken conversational way, they’re usually choosing the more conversational way.

Lee Rawles:

So speaking of things about language and usage that has seen some changes in the past, say decade or so pronouns, could you talk a little bit about how the justices are using pronouns? Obviously some of the ways that we’ve addressed pronouns as a society are undergoing a change anyway. Would love hear from you about pronoun usage.

Jill Barton:

The justices are definitely showing a willingness to have more inclusive language, and they’re getting away from using he as a universal pronoun, which of course is something that all good writers would advise. They are also embracing the use of pronouns in other ways, such as, for example, in the Bostock v Clayton County case in 2020, that involved a transgender woman and Justice Gorsuch used the correct pronouns for her. Interestingly enough though the brief did not, the government’s brief did not use the correct personal pronouns. And in 2023 there was another case involving a transgender woman and both the briefs for the government and the petitioner use the correct pronouns. And of course, justice Tun Brown Jackson’s opinion used the correct pronouns too. So they haven’t had a chance to use the non-binary yet. There hasn’t been a case before the court where they would use that, but it seems like there’s a willingness to have some inclusive language there that’s different though than the singular they

Lee Rawles:

The singular they, which I love. It’s so much faster and easier than saying he or she or she, he or she, he or she.

Jill Barton:

If we’re talking about a generic employee, it is so much easier to just say they, because then you might have to twist your words around and talk about employees plural. So you could use the they. The justices are very careful in avoiding that. The case involving the coach preying on the 50 yard line used the word team a lot and no one uses the singular pronoun it with team. And the justices didn’t use it, they just wrote around it in every single instance. So they really are not using the word they for a singular individual or employee. They’re talking about just a generic individual. And they’re also not using the singular pronoun they for a collective noun like Congress or court, which is interesting because if you look at the Constitution, Congress was referred to as they in the constitution. So the justices aren’t there yet, although many, many writing scholars are pushing for it.

Lee Rawles:

One thing I appreciated too is within your chapters, and just for listeners who don’t have an index in front of them, once we get past all of the punctuation in some of the later chapters, you’re addressing things like names and titles, negatives, prepositions, relative pronouns, split in definitives, things of this nature. You do label some things unanimous rules, majority rules, but then there’s also just a guiding principle. Can you talk about some of the guiding principles that you wanted to highlight for readers when they are looking to emulate the court?

Jill Barton:

Sure. So a guiding principle might come down to something like with adjectives and adverbs. Of course, we can’t say that the justice is never use adjectives and adverbs and they kill them all as Mark Twain advised. But they do use very few adjectives and adverbs, only three to 5% of their words are actually adjectives and adverbs. And many good writers will say that we should use strong verbs and strong nouns to show the action in a sentence rather than trying to build it up with adjectives and ad verbs. And it’s impossible to come up with a unanimous or a majority rule. You should never use adjectives and ad verbs. So in that sense, I want to give a guiding principle, but in the example, for example, looking at the word because the word because is very important in legal writing because causal relationships are important.

And you might’ve learned in grammar school that you should not substitute the word because for since, and that might be something that’s been emphasized even more as a legal writer because of that importance of causal relationships. But the justices used because interchangeably with sins. And so when they do something like that unanimously, I want the readers to know, look, this is something they do unanimously, but if it’s a split close rule, like five of them do one thing and four of them do another. I also want readers to know that there’s some flexibility here that if you feel strongly about sticking to that old fashioned grammar rule, maybe you’re in good company with four justices. And that’s the purpose of having the unanimous rules, the majority rules, and also the guiding principles.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another break to hear from advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Jill Barton, author of the Supreme Guide to Writing. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Jill Barton. So Jill, are there any legal writing kind of urban legends about how the Supreme Court writes or views a particular part of language that you kind of uncovered in your research? Was there anything that you were surprised at once you actually looked at the pages and how the justices are writing?

Jill Barton:

So many things surprised me as I was drawing conclusion from these 10,000 pages of court opinions. Mostly just how frequently the court left behind outdated rules, and even just searching through the opinions for some of those big lawyerly words like moreover and nonetheless. And nevertheless, I was surprised at how rarely they used words like that and how often they would do something like start a sentence with the word. So they would do that many more times. They also end sentences with preposition. They split infinitives, they dangle modifiers, which this is one thing about looking through 10,000 pages, you can see that that’s actually not a mistake that happened one or two times. This is something that they do on occasion when within the context, the modifying part of that sentence is clear in another part of that paragraph. And some of these things are going to come as a shock to lawyers and grammarians. They certainly come as a shock to some of my students who are trying to emulate those a hundred year old opinions that they’re reading. But the writing of the court has evolved to be very modern and in response, I’m trying to modernize my own writing.

Lee Rawles:

You have been a long time writer, but it used to be that you were writing for a journalistic audience, and then in your career you had this change. You went into the law, you became a clerk for one of the judges on the Florida’s third district court of appeals, and your writing style I assume had to change. Can you talk a little bit about that shift and what are some of the major differences?

Jill Barton:

There were some big differences, mostly just in the size of topics you had to grapple with. A lot of times you would be assigned a story as a journalist and you would write it in the same day. Whereas as an appellate judicial clerk, you would be given boxes and boxes of materials and have to digest them and figure out how to condense them into a memo, which is a much bigger task. And that really represents the challenge of legal writing. You’re taking these complex subjects and you are trying to boil them down to their essence and write about complicated topics in a simple way as possible. Another challenge with being a judicial clerk is maybe you’re not going to be writing in your own voice. You want to try to emulate the voice of your judge, which might be different than your own. And of course, as a new lawyer, everyone told me, you are going to have to learn an entirely new way to write as a lawyer, which isn’t true. I think good writing is good writing, but of course there are some rules I have to follow. Now, some rules I didn’t necessarily want to follow. Now, as a lawyer, the serial comma rule, for example, you didn’t follow that as a journalist, but you have to follow that now.

Lee Rawles:

And one thing that I find very valuable about the Associated Press style book, which you mentioned at the top of our episode, and I have to tell the non journalist in the audience, it truly is the Bible, but every year they come out with a new edition, they look at English as a living language and they examine, they add new entries. There was a big shift that had to happen when the internet came around and all of a sudden they had to make decisions about Alright, should website be capitalized? And for a while it was, which I hated. And there are some things that linger for a very long time teenager used to be hyphenated when I started as a journalist. And that seems wild now. But like you said, a lot of lawyers begin their careers reading, very old writing and trying to accustom themselves to writing in what now seems like a little bit of an archaic style. So I really appreciate that you did this work and you looked at, okay, well, how are the justices writing now? And would love to hear about any feedback that you’ve gotten since this book came out now, it just came out fairly recently, but what have you heard from people who found out about your project and have gotten a chance to take a look at it?

Jill Barton:

One surprising reaction I keep getting from people is how funny the book is. And in that sense, how funny some of the sentences are that I’m sharing from the justices because they can be very entertaining. And I think that when the Supreme Court is boiled down to the headlines you read online or in newspapers, it’s very serious. We’re always talking about the politically charged cases, but there were 60 cases this term and only some of them were the landmark cases. So in the others, maybe the less serious ones, the justices really do take some time to have fun with language and play around with words and entertain us too. So that’s really fun that I can see that people really do take away that the justices are great writers. They’re not just handing down these big decisions on presidential immunity and abortion. They are deciding other issues of the day and writing them in a way that is entertaining and informative.

Lee Rawles:

And just on a personal note, again, aside from the court case come down in a way that you agree with, who are some of your favorite writers currently on the bench?

Jill Barton:

This is a great question, and it really does show how much politics do not play a part in writing. So if you look at who I’m quoting the most in the book, there are three of them. It’s Chief Justice Roberts, it’s Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Neil Gorsuch. And those are the three I look to first. But all of the justices really are great writers. I have some great examples from Justice Sotomayor and Justice Barrett as well. And the study was for five years. So there’s just one year of Justice Jackson in that. But the justices all have their moments when they shine. But of course, I do have my favorites and my favorites too. I pull out all the time when I’m in class to share examples with my students.

Lee Rawles:

This is not the first book you’ve written about legal writing. Do you want to tell listeners just a little bit more about your other two books?

Jill Barton:

The other two books I have written are textbooks. One is a first year legal writing textbook. So if your listeners are lawyers, they might remember their legal writing class and the legal writing textbook they had to read. And that really guides students through learning how to write a legal memo and a legal brief and how to approach exams, for example. And another book I wrote was also a textbook for a judicial writing course. So for anyone who was hoping to be a judicial clerk or maybe even eventually a judge, that book really guides them in writing orders and opinions.

Lee Rawles:

And I realized that this is a very mean question to ask writers who have just completed massive projects and books that ate a bunch of their life. But do you know what your next big project will be? Or are you really focused on just discussing the Supreme guide to writing and what you discovered in your research?

Jill Barton:

I think writers, especially someone who’s been writing as long as me, we were always thinking of the next big project. And I have this fabulous database now of six years of opinions compiled for each justice and compiled for the court as a whole, which is just this rich resource for searching things about how the justices write. And so my next project, I really want to look at points of style and persuasion and how the justices use words in a way, what their specific style is in terms of how they can make their points stronger and to provide some tactics and some strategies for people from these present day examples.

Lee Rawles:

If someone has been out of law school for a very long time, and as I said has been a practitioner for a long time and maybe is not an appellate lawyer, doesn’t read the Supreme Court opinions all that frequently, are there some key takeaways you would love for more longtime practitioners to have from what you’ve discovered in the Supreme Guide to writing?

Jill Barton:

Absolutely. So some of the key takeaways are short words and short sentences. We want to get away from those big clunky conjunctions and use things like, but, and so we want to use commas in a way that reflects the cadence of the way we speak, but oftentimes just cut off that sentence and make it shorter. The justices also are using a lot more contractions and a lot more fragments in their writing to show that this is the way we speak. We don’t always speak with complete sentences, and they’re writing the way they speak for the most part. There’s some exceptions, like as with pronouns, they speak differently than they write, but for the most part, they’re writing in a much more casual way just in the way you and I are having this conversation.

Lee Rawles:

And then if people were interested in finding out more about the Supreme Guide to Writing or more about you, where could they go?

Jill Barton:

They can find me at jillbarton.net on my website. I have a pop quiz where you can see if you write like a Supreme Court justice just before warned, the average right now is about six out of 10 correct answers.

Lee Rawles:

This is making me feel better because I took that quiz listeners and I got an eight out of 10 that because since tripped me up, and I’m not going to say what was correct and what wasn’t because I encourage you to go take that quiz. But I got an eight out of 10.

Jill Barton:

Yes. Well, my colleagues who are legal writing professors are also getting six and sevens and eights out of 10. So it’s meant to be a challenging quiz to really shine a light on the fact that the justices write differently than you might think. And your listeners can also find me on Instagram. I’m under legal writing prof, short for professor. And there I share tips and advice on writing and grammar, and I love hearing from writers and lawyers and law students with their questions or comments.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you to Jill Barton for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. And thank you listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to go and write a review. Subscribe to the podcast on any of the major podcast listening services. If you want to reach out about a book that you read that you think would make a great topic for the podcast, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.