"Beware the Monological Imperatives"

I'm glad Austen has plugged his fine new co-authored book, Effective Lawyering: A Checklist Approach to Legal Writing and Oral Argument.  He was so modest about it, waiting until below the fold to mention it in his recent post, that I thought a little more attention was needed.

Let me piggyback on Austen's post, and his book, to mention an article recently posted on SSRN by Professor Joan Magat at Duke Law School, titled Beware the 'Monological Imperatives': Scholarly Writing for the Reader.  Here's the abstract:

This article describes principles of effective academic writing - offered not as edicts, but as guidelines - for legal scholars in particular. The overall focus is style, but the discussion begins with observations of format. These are followed by a few stylistic principles that govern clear and effective writing. None of these principles is a revelation to the student of method or to the accomplished writer. But for the academic writer less focused on or less familiar with such principles, being aware of and practicing them can clear the fog from syntax, illuminate the writer's thesis and its development, and help keep the reader's eye on the text. This last objective should be the writer's first: to anticipate the reader's understanding and responses and to know what piques and what holds the reader's interest.

It's a very readable and interesting article, providing the kind of advice on scholarly writing that scholars, alas, should read once or twice a year.  Magat leavens her article with examples drawn from published legal scholarship, and can be very forceful in her prescriptions, although she acknowledges that every rule has its exceptions.  I don't agree by a long shot with everything she has to say, although it's more than possible that the fault lies in my writing, not her advice.  But it offers a lot of useful advice to legal scholars -- who, by and large, are convinced that just about everyone else's writing, if not their own, could use some improvement.

My goal here is really to spotlight her article, and nothing more.  Still, one way of opening this up to reader participation is to ask: whose legal academic writing do you most admire?  I cannot help but put Posner at the top of my list, although many more would belong on the list, some for their cripsness and others for their evocative, oracular flavor.  I am intoxicated by the difficult but majestic opening pages of Jed Rubenfeld's book Freedom and Time, for instance, and I think that Larry Solum's time in the blogosphere has added a punchy and familiar tone to his recent writing.  I'm sure others will want to make additions to, and subtractions from, the list.  I might add, finally, that I would put Raymond Chandler at the very top of the list, but for the fact that he didn't write legal scholarship.