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Jennifer Murphy Romig*
Abstract:
This article brings scholarly attention to the blog posts, tweets, updates and other writing on social media that many lawyers generate and many others would consider generating, if they had the time and skill to do so. In the broadest terms, this genre of writing is “public legal writing”: writing by lawyers not for any specific client but for dissemination to the public or through wide distribution channels, particularly the Internet. Legal blogging is a good entry point into public legal writing because legal blog posts often share some analytical features of longer articles alongside conversational conventions typical of writing on social media. Legal blogging is certainly not new, but this article brings new attention to it.
The article begins by reviewing helpful (nonlegal) advice from two recent writing guidebooks, Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little and Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times. Primed by the ideas in these books, the article explores the genre of legal blogging through two case studies of legal blog posts in 2014. Finally, the article puts legal blogging into context by addressing its similarities to and differences from traditional legal writing. Legal blogging offers a respite from the formalities of traditional legal writing, but it also brings its own set of expectations and constraints that define the evolving boundaries of this genre.
* Instructor, Legal Writing, Research, and Advocacy Program, Emory University School of Law. Thanks to Emory Law librarians Elizabeth Christian, Kelly Parker, and Thomas Sneed; to Emory Law student Utena Yang for invaluable research assistance with this article; and to Emory Law Program Coordinator Ebony Mobley for assistance with managing the sources cited in this article. Thanks also to the leaders and participants at the ALWD Innovative Teaching Workshop held at Stetson University College of Law in March 2014, whose advice on a new blogging course for law students at Emory Law School also helped generate important questions motivating this article; and to Kirsten K. Davis of the Stetson University College of Law for encouragement on the article. Thanks are due also to Brian Rogers, founder of The Contracts Guy (www.thecontractsguy.net), and to the co-teacher of the new blogging course, Emory Law School’s Assistant Dean for Information Technology Benjamin Chapman, both of whom were kind enough to read earlier drafts.