Search results for "humor in legal writing"

Several people asked what I thought about humor in legal writing, a topic I touch on in my Academic Legal Writing book. Here’s my thinking on the subject:

1. Humor can be valuable: It can keep the reader interested, put the reader in a good mood, and make the reader feel something of a psychological link to the author. Humor in article titles can also help the article be more eye-catching and more memorable. I still remember an article title I saw in the early 1990s, “One Hundred Years of Privacy”; this both communicated the article’s essence (a look back on the privacy tort a century after Warren and Brandeis first proposed it), and humorously alluded to the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Another article was called “A RFRA Runs Through It,” echoing the title of the movie “A River Runs Through It.” People who are familiar with religious freedom law know that RFRA is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, commonly pronounced “riff-rah,” not that different from “river.” The article’s thesis was that after the enactment of the federal RFRA, the entire U.S. Code should be read as if RFRA had amended each statute, and changed the policy balance struck by the drafters of each statute — hence RFRA runs through the entire Code, so the joke is apt. Plus the article was published in a symposium conducted by the Montana Law Review, and the movie was set in Montana. Cute.

2. At the same time, you should be very careful about trying to be funny in your legal writing, for several reasons.

a. We amateur comedians notoriously overestimate how funny our jokes are.

b. Even an amusing gag distracts the reader from your main point. To be effective, the joke must be interesting and memorable enough that its [...]

There is a longstanding argument over the question of whether scholarship improves teaching in academia or detracts from it. Some claim that productive scholars are better teachers because they have a greater command of the subject and more original insights to convey to their students. On the other hand, it’s also possible that scholarly productivity detracts from teaching. The time academics spend writing articles and books could instead have been devoted to improving their teaching skills.

Ben Barton of the University of Tennessee Law School has an excellent new article testing the impact of scholarship on teaching. He shows that there is little or no correlation between scholarly productivity and teaching ability (as measured by student evaluations) in a sample of over 600 law professors from 19 schools. Thus, scholarship neither improves teaching ability nor detracts from it.

This study is an important advance over the existing literature. But I have two significant reservations about it. First, Barton was not able to find data controlling for other variables that might affect teaching quality. For example, the quality of teaching might be influenced by a professor’s speaking style, organization, personality, and so on. Some of these omitted variables might well be inversely correlated with scholarship. If so, it’s possible that if we controlled for them, we might find that better scholars are better teachers after all.

Second, student evaluations are a highly imperfect measure of teaching quality; some of their shortcomings could end up biasing Barton’s results against the hypothesis that scholarship improves teaching. I’m not one of those professors who thinks that student evaluations are useless. To the contrary, they often contain important and valid criticisms of the professor. My own teaching, I believe, has improved as a result of attending to such critiques. Nonetheless, teaching quality is far from [...]

This is the second in my series of guestblog posts about the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, how it is organized and governed, and some aspects of its impact. My thanks to everyone who has commented on my post from yesterday. Later in the week I’ll have a post or two specifically focused on people’s comments, so please keep them coming.

As I mentioned yesterday and was picked up in the comments, one of the sources of Wikipedia’s popularity and influence is the fact that pages in it rank so highly on Google and other search engines. Where the Wikipedia page is an accurate, well-written, well-sourced article on the topic it covers, that is fine. On the other hand, some articles are better than others. And even if a page did once contain brilliant prose, it could have been changed for the worse by anyone, before a given reader finds it and reads it.

The shortest way of expressing this is that Wikipedia’s primary weakness precisely corresponds to its greatest strength. The best feature of the site is that anyone can edit (virtually) anything contained on it. The worst feature of the site is that anyone can edit virtually anything contained on it.

The ability of anyone to edit raises especially serious issues where an article concerns a specific living person. As long as an individual is “notable” by Wikipedia standards (with notability defined partly by a series of guidelines and partly subjectively), any registered editor is free to create a Wikipedia page about him or her, and anyone else is then free to edit that page.

In the first instance, this makes sense. Articles about human beings and their achievements are part of the core content of an encyclopedia. One could hardly imagine a general-purpose encyclopedia without articles about all of [...]

The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct has censured Commission Chair Raoul Felder for cowriting (with Jackie Mason) a book called Schmucks! Our Favorite Fakes, Frauds, Lowlifes, Liars, the Armed and Dangerous and Good Guys Gone Bad, and is “exploring [its] options in terms of removing him as Chair.” Here’s the Commission’s reasoning:

Much of the material in this book, and the work as a whole, undermine the appearance of impartiality, and the dignity and probity that is required of the Commission and its Chair. Although the book purports to be a work of humor, much of it is crude, biased, vulgar and otherwise demeaning. For example, we note the following.

• The book repeatedly invokes racial, ethnic and religious invective. Such statements are inconsistent with the Commission’s role in enforcing the judicial obligations to refrain from words or conduct that manifest bias based on race, religion or national origin, and to require court employees and lawyers to refrain from such conduct.

• The book asserts that “anytime you hear the word ‘allegedly,’ you can bet it’s true.” Such a viewpoint is untenable from a Commission member whose role is to evaluate allegations of judicial misconduct and identify those that have merit.

• The book claims that “nothing in our country is more insidious than affirmative action.” Such a sentiment raises a reasonable perception that the speaker could not pass fair judgment on anyone he perceived to have benefited from affirmative action.

Appointed government officials are not shielded by the First Amendment from removal the way citizens are shielded by the First Amendment from criminal punishment or civil liability. High executive branch officials who serve at a President’s or Governor’s pleasure may be fired for their speech, even if that happens only because the President or Governor thinks the speech is [...]

Eric Muller (IsThatLegal?) points to more unattributed copying in a dean’s graduation speech — but this is copying of someone else’s witticisms, rather than of someone else’s serious analysis.

I’m not sure whether such copying is particularly bad. Witticisms, jokes, and other amusing turns of phrase lose much of their charm if you need to prefix them with “As X said” or “This reminds me of Y’s joke” or “Here’s a joke that Z tells” — especially if you need to repeat these lines a couple of dozen times in the course of a speech. In practice, we tend to avoid giving credit by the simple expedient of not knowing whom to credit; precisely because people retell jokes without attributing them, we usually have no idea who first said something. But what if you know the source? Or what if you can find it by googling? Do you have an obligation to track down the sources and give them credit in the speech, even if that means boring and annoying the audience?

Now one reaction might be “tough luck”: If you don’t want to give credit, make up your own gags, or omit them altogether. But speeches like this are an odd genre — they are generally expected to have some wit in them, but they must often be written by people who aren’t professional wits. We can reasonably demand, I think, that a professional comic come up with his own material; I am told that comics who are known for stealing material are condemned by their fellows. But should we really ask this of the many people whose non-comedy jobs nonetheless require them to give speeches that include some comic relief?

Recall also that of the two chief harms of plagiarism — harm to the reader, who is led [...]