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What is a Legal Writing?

Owner
Oliver
When we talk about legal writing, it is a special kind of writing that is done by attorney, legislators, judges and other people in law. The main purpose of this kind of writing is to communicate all types of rights, legal duties, analysis etc.

Legal writing is very different from regular writing, as it is more technical and involve a continuous dependence on citations. This type of writing gives more importance to the precedence and also uses special legalese to make it sound very formal.

Although, many changes have been made to reduce the formal style of writing and making the legal write up very simple for a layman to understand. While writing over a legal matter, one should always remember that the purpose of such type of writing is to make a precise document, but informal style could make the intentions of the text quite hazy.

There are two types of legal writing: Legal analysis and Legal drafting.

Legal analysis is a predictive and persuasive form of writing, while legal drafting is used to create binding, legal text. In American law, two standard manuals/ rulebooks are usually used to refer to citation. The twp rulebooks are ALWD Citation manual, which is a professional system of citation and the other is The Bluebook, that tells about a uniform system of citation.

The actual words used in legal writing are divided into four categories:

  • Words that are unique to law. For example: tort.
  • Old English works, which are not used anymore. Example: Herein, hereto, hereby and more.
  • Words from other languages. Example: Prima facie, mens rea, habeas corpus and more.
  • Words/phrases that have different meaning in law. Example: execute (to sign, to effect), and party (a principal in a lawsuit).

Legal forms and templates have nowadays came out as common tools in legal writing, because a lot of value is given to precedence. This makes lawyers to use as well as repeat same writing in similar situations from the past.

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