Reddit reviews Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, Seminar Papers, and Getting on Law Review (University Casebook)

Great answer. Read some Hemingway. Short direct sentences.
"For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

Get Volokh's book on legal writing. It won't make you quicker, but might increase your confidence.

https://www.amazon.com/Academic-Legal-Writing-andGetting-University/dp/1599417502

This is all I read, easy read and gives you a good idea of the process.

Everyone else recommends Volkoh, but I barely cracked the cover though.

I agree with bl1y.

I'm 3 years practicing with my second law review article getting published in around a month.

My first article topic came by looking at what I experienced as a practitioner every day. Pretty soon I got a feeling that maybe the courts were not applying a rule the way I perceived it should be applied. So, I looked into different cases where I thought the rule was inconsistent or at least not reconcilable. Turns out, there were a bunch.

My second article topic came from regularly reading decisions from the top court in my state. While doing that, I was not looking for a topic, but I did notice a pattern of things that generated dissents or concurrences. The judges almost had a funny way of discussing this topic and it caught my eye. It never occurred to me when reading that this was an article waiting to be written. Instead, it was only after about a year or so of reading cases that the topic gelled as article-worthy when someone asked if I would be interested in writing an article and they were looking for topics. It turned into a ~30-page law review article exploring the topic, history, and those recent decisions.

Not sure if your girlfriend was part of an academic journal in law school, but the idea is the same: anyone can write a case study. Rather, it is the synthesis of various cases and legal rules that adds meaning and broadens literature.

I want to say that I did all my research before I wrote a page. The truth is that writing itself is an organic process. You often need to start a little bit of writing to find more relevant literature.

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For me, the idea of finding a topic is like nucleation sites for crystals. For example, see this video of supercooled water. The idea of supercooled water and "instant" ice is that the water is cold enough to be ice, but it needs a place to start. Once it starts, however, the entire bottle of water changes phase. So, you could be ready to write an article, but you still need that spark, the place to start and to build from. That can come from (like the video shows) outside agitation (or impurities but lets not get to heavy into the science).


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Eugene Volokh has a book called Academic Legal Writing. I found it particularly helpful during law school and still to this day. But I remember it being cheaper back then. In any event, it covers issues from the genesis of ideas to the methodology of good research to better writing.

http://www.amazon.com/Academic-Legal-Writing-andGetting-University/dp/1599417502