Recommended Legal Writing Reads from Judge Easterbrook

This past October, as a Judicial Intern at the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, I had the pleasure of attending an informal, reoccurring brown bag lunch held among the court’s clerks. We gathered in a conference room down the hall from the Dirksen Federal Building’s second-floor cafeteria to hear this session’s guest speaker—Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook—lecture informally on legal writing. The judge shared some of his experiences (e.g., his decision-making process*) and his must-read books for legal writers.

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Advice on Appeals from Howard Eisenberg

Just like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, there’s nothing like having fourteen people over to Thanksgiving dinner to concentrate the mind.  In my case, it’s also the galvanizing principle to buckle down and clean house.

This year, the task was truly daunting — the family room had become nearly impassible, swamped by pile after pile of paper and other detritus related to serial family emergencies and funerals of the past few years.  And let’s face it, if the laws of physics dictate a that an object in motion tends to remain in motion, the rules of law and gravity at my house dictate that clutter tends to remain in place, and magnetically attracts more of the same.  Exponentially.

Still, the pool table and foosball tables weren’t going to excavate themselves for company, and so I parked the puppy in “doggie day-care” and rolled up my sleeves.  

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Video Feedback on Student Work

Recently, for the first time, I used video and audio technology to provide feedback on student papers in my first-year legal writing class. From my perspective, it was a terrific success.  Giving live, oral feedback over video of each student’s paper allowed me to explain my questions, comments, and corrections more naturally and precisely, and also more quickly.  I think that most students found the oral feedback useful as well.

The technology I used is TechSmith’s Jing.  There may well be other free software products that offer something similar, but Jing is the one that was brought to my attention (by a student, actually–thanks, Priya Barnes).  After viewing another educator’s blog post and video demonstrating his use of the product to give feedback, I thought I’d try it.

Here is how the video/audio method of commenting works:

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