Appellate Advocacy Blog

Demeanor in the virtual courtroom

The United States Supreme Court provides counsel with a "Guide for Counsel in Cases to be Argued Before the Supreme Court of the United States." In that guide, counsel can learn how they should dress (conservative business dress in traditional dark colors), where they should sit, how they should move to and from those seats, how they should address the justices ("justice," and never "judge"), and so on. Similarly, in moot court, there is a category on most ballots labeled "courtroom demeanor," where fledgling appellate advocates are judged in how they comport themselves in court.

In the trial world, counsel is often reminded that the jury is always watching. Anecdotes abound. One attorney, who represented a car manufacturer at trial, was seen driving a car manufactured by another company. The jury decided he did not believe in his client and penalized him at trial. Another attorney told the jury in voir dire about his wife and family. The jury noted he was not wearing a wedding ring, and decided he was a liar. Eye rolls, sighs, and disrespect shown in a multitude of ways are blamed for countless lost cases.

But for some reason, when appearing virtually, many lawyers forget that demeanor matters. At one recent matter, I saw opposing counsel sighing, rolling eyes, getting up, getting snacks and water, and laughing with staff, all on camera, and all while opposing counsel, witnesses, and even the judge were speaking.

I get it. Having a camera on you for hours desensitizes you to the technology. If you don't have your camera shown, in particular, you can quickly forget that you are seen. But most counsel I know use "gallery view" in their zoom or other virtual software, as do most judges, so that not just the speaker is shown. And just like in the real courtroom, your behavior on that screen matters.

Credibility is the coin of persuasion. Why waste that credibility by acting poorly on screen? And while the behavior I described above was at a hearing, I have seen similar behavior during oral argument, when the justices are going to go back into chambers (virtually, perhaps, or in person), where you should hope they will discuss the merits of your argument, and not the content of your character writ large on their screens.

So please, even when appearing virtually, remember that demeanor matters. And don't forget to wear your conservative business dress in traditional dark colors.

(image credit: Image created in Bing Image Center, Powered by DALL-E AI image generator, using the prompt "attorneys behaving badly at counsel table, in the style of Thomas Nast.")

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT Can Improve Your Legal Writing—Even if You Never Use ChatGPT

Thursday’s Rhaw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT Can Improve Your Legal Writing—Even if You Never Use ChatGPT

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT and Bing’s AI-powered chat, is motivating a fundamental reconsideration of the ethics and practicalities of how humans can produce good writing.  In the legal writing context, there’s plenty of discussion around whether and how legal writers should use generative AI as part of writing practice.  While I’m not going to delve into the questions about whether and how to best use generative AI like ChatGPT in legal writing (I’ve already done a little bit of that here), I want to look at a skill necessary for working effectively with generative AI that I think can help you be a better writer in general:  prompt engineering or prompt design.   Understanding prompt engineering and applying it to your own writing can help you write better.

What is Prompt Engineering?

Prompt engineering is the process of using specific words and phrases along with choices about the structure and organization of those words and phrases to write instructions that improve generative AI’s ability to provide a response that is useful to a human prompter.  The emerging literature around generative AI suggests that prompt engineering will be a skill that writers will need to competently use large language models like ChatGPT. 

Prompting for ChatGPT is done in natural language, in everyday conversational English (for English speakers). This is because ChatGPT is trained to understand and respond to conversation in a conversational manner.  So no specialized programming knowledge is needed to prompt ChatGPT;  instead, a human prompter needs two things:  (1) an understanding the rhetorical situation to which ChatGPT is being asked to respond, and (2) an ability to communicate that rhetorical situation precisely and clearly to ChatGPT in everyday language.

Prompt Engineering and the Rhetorical Situation

Prompt engineering, at bottom, represents a human ability to carefully describe rhetorical situations that call for some kind of communicative response.  In other words, prompts give ChatGPT a way to get to know the rhetorical situation confronting the human prompter, which includes the needs of the audience, the limitations and opportunities presented by the context, and the purpose of the writing in relation to the issues confronted by the writer. Like all other writing, writing generated by ChatGPT is more effective if it is written specifically for the rhetorical situation the human writer envisions; that is, it is written for a specific audience, with a specific purpose, and in an appropriate tone.  The better engineered a prompt, the better chance there is of generating useful text appropriate for the rhetorical situation. 

An Example of the Basic Techniques of Prompt Engineering

Ultimately, prompt engineering is a set of techniques that encourage ChatGPT to generate more useful responses.  There’s quite a bit to know about prompt engineering, but reviewing the basic concept will help you understand how prompt engineering techniques can improve your own writing regardless of whether generative AI is part of the process.  Let’s walk through an example of how we might prompt ChatGPT to generate content about an appellate standard of review.

 “Write a paragraph that sets out the de novo standard of review.”

This is a basic prompt in the form of an instruction, and I used it to get this result from ChatGPT: 

The de novo standard of review is a legal standard applied by courts when reviewing decisions made by lower courts or administrative agencies. Under this standard, the reviewing court gives no deference to the decision made by the lower court or agency, and instead, conducts a completely fresh review of the evidence and legal arguments presented. This means that the reviewing court does not consider the lower court or agency's decision as binding or controlling and has the power to make an entirely new decision based on the evidence and arguments presented to it. The de novo standard of review is typically used in cases where there are no factual findings to be reviewed, or when the issue being reviewed is a question of law.

Not too bad, but through prompt engineering, I might generate a better result.  First, I can give ChatGPT context about the rhetorical situation, specifically describing the audience for whom it is writing: 

“You are writing an appellate brief for the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit.  Appellate court judges are your audience.”

I can also describe to ChatGPT the specific output I expect: 

“Write a paragraph that sets out the de novo standard for the standard of review section of the appellate brief.”  

So now, my more specific, detailed, and rhetorically aware prompt looks like this:

“You are writing an appellate brief for the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit.  Appellate court judges are your audience. Write a paragraph that sets out the de novo standard for the standard of review section of the appellate brief.”

In this prompt, I've added more information about the rhetorical situation for ChatGPT to draw upon as it attempts to predict the best response for the prompt.  (Remember, ChatGPT and other generative AI predict what words are appropriate in response to the prompt; they do not think, analyze, or evaluate, they predict using mathematical models for language). 

This was the response to my new prompt:

In this appellate brief, we are appealing a decision made by a lower court to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. As appellate court judges will be our audience, it is important to explain the standard of review that will be applied in this case. Under the de novo standard of review, the appellate court will review the lower court's decision without giving any deference to the lower court's findings or legal conclusions. The appellate court will instead conduct a fresh review of the record and make its own determination as to the appropriate legal outcome. This standard of review is typically applied in cases where the lower court's decision involved purely legal issues or when there were no factual findings made by the lower court. In this case, we argue that the de novo standard of review should be applied to our appeal.

Two notable things happened here. First, expert legal writers will recognize stylistic junk in the response.  Specifically, a clumsy first sentence, an explicit nod to judges as the audience, and a specific statement that it is important to identify the standard of review are all stylistically awkward choices for an appellate brief.  But second, and more favorably, experts will recognize that ChatGPT generated a response that is more rhetorically aware:  it generated a response that is less academic in its tone and is written from the point of view of the appellant. While the voice of the paragraph needs more attention in revision, ChatGPT has improved the rhetorical sensibility of the response.

But I think I can get ChatGPT to do better.

Rather than having ChatGPT start over with a new paragraph, I’m going to give it a chance to revise the existing paragraph.  I will ask ChatGPT to revise what it wrote, and I will give it more detailed information about the rhetorical situation (in other words, I will add more input data for it to work with in generating a response).  I’ll tell ChatGPT that I am dealing with an appeal from summary judgment and that I’d like some case citations:

“Revise this paragraph to focus on the standard of de novo review for summary judgment motions.  Add citations to cases from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that support the assertions in the paragraph.”

Here’s the response:

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the standard of review for summary judgment motions is de novo. This means that the appellate court will review the lower court's decision on summary judgment without any deference to the lower court's findings or legal conclusions. The appellate court will conduct a fresh review of the record to determine whether there are any genuine issues of material fact and whether the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. As stated in Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., 257 F.3d 1258 (11th Cir. 2001), "we review a grant of summary judgment de novo, applying the same legal standards as the district court and viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party." Similarly, in Rice-Lamar v. City of Fort Lauderdale, 232 F.3d 836 (11th Cir. 2000), the Eleventh Circuit held that "we review the grant of summary judgment de novo, drawing all inferences in favor of the nonmoving party." Therefore, we ask the appellate court to apply the de novo standard of review in this case to ensure a fair and impartial review of the lower court's decision on summary judgment.

A good appellate writer will recognize that there’s still some stylistic awkwardness in this paragraph that can be eliminated with some revision.  For example, the paragraph can be made more concise by eliminating the quoted material from the case law and instead using the citations provided (assuming they are accurate—accuracy cannot be assumed with ChatGPT) to support the first three sentences of the paragraph. But what is good about the paragraph is that its detail, point-of-view, and tone are more tailored to the rhetorical situation confronting the appellate writer, and the paragraph is responsive to the human prompter’s details. At minimum, there is more richness in the content that the human drafter can use to write  an effective statement of the standard of review.

In sum, three ideas about writing emerge from our prompt engineering example:

• Good writing depends on the writer’s ability to carefully interrogate and explicitly articulate the features of the rhetorical situation.
• Being able to identify and articulate the specific writing task to be performed, the context for that task, the details of that context, and the output to be generated can improve the chances of writing to effectively respond to the rhetorical situation.
• Prompt engineering can improve the process of making targeted, thoughtful, and specific revisions.

Using Prompt Engineering in Your Own Writing (and in Mentoring Others’ Writing)

Even if a legal writer never uses a tool like ChatGPT to generate text, using the techniques of prompt engineering in the writing process can help legal writers write better.

It’s likely true that experts in appellate writing subconsciously generate prompts like those we’ve examined here, and those subconscious prompts guide their writing. But remember that ChatGPT got better at its task when it received explicitly stated, detailed prompts.  What might it look like to do the same thing in your own writing, to use prompt engineering as a conscious step?  And could prompt engineering help expert writers mentor inexperienced ones?

Here’s an example of how prompt engineering might help a more experienced writer mentor a more novice one.

Imagine this case. A school district disciplines a high school student for refusing to participate in a school assembly honoring Veteran’s Day.  The student asserts a political motive for refusing to participate and that the discipline violates her free speech rights.  Both the school district and the student move for summary judgment before the trial court.  The court grants summary judgment for the school district and denies it for the student.  The student’s lawyers, one senior appellate lawyer and one junior one, are working together on the appeal, arguing that, as a matter of law, the trial court decided the cross-motions incorrectly.

The junior lawyer has written the first draft of the brief, but the senior lawyer has found it lacking in persuasiveness, particularly because the junior lawyer has not been effective in supporting her argument with factually analogous cases that have outcomes favorable to the student’s position.

In guiding the junior lawyer’s revisions (whether in conversation or in writing), the senior lawyer could use prompt engineering techniques.  The senior lawyer could give the junior a basic instruction like “Improve the quality of the analogies in the arguments.”  But engineering that prompt could yield better results. First, a better instruction would clarify the task: “Add to the argument analogies to cases that are factually similar and support the outcome we seek.”

Then the prompt would include context that helps the junior lawyer see the rhetorical situation more clearly and from the point of view of the more experienced lawyer.  For example, the senior lawyer could add:

“The judges will find analogies to cases persuasive.  Cases where an appellate court has reversed summary judgment on similar facts are good for analogies. Ideally, you want to draw the court’s attention to cases where a student was silent or absent from a required school activity and asserted a political reason and the court thought the student was entitled to summary judgment.”

Even further, a good prompt from the senior lawyer could include the output expectation:  “Revise your argument paragraphs to add comparisons to at least two cases (if you can find them) that are analogous on their facts and favorable on their outcome.  Be specific about the analogies—use details to show how the cases are similar to our case.”

So, what’s going on here?  We’ve engineered a prompt—from senior lawyer to junior one—that is more likely to yield what the senior lawyer knows will be more effective argument in the appellate brief. It includes detailed instructions, input data about useful analogies, audience information, and clear output instructions.

While this example reflects communicating a prompt between two people, you can be your own audience for a prompt.  Before beginning a project,  you might write a prompt that will guide the drafting. In addition, when you are struggling with a particular part of a document, you might stop and ask, “What is my prompt for writing this?”  “What instructions do I give myself here?  What is the context, the audience, the purpose?  What is the output I’m seeking?”  You might even take a moment and write that prompt down to focus your efforts.  By using the techniques of prompt engineering, you can slow down the process and explicitly analyze the rhetorical situation, which can improve the output.

The Recap

Prompt engineering is a useful technique for working with generative AI because prompt engineering can improve the quality of the responses generated.  But prompt engineering can also be a useful technique for legal writers more generally because prompting forces writers to carefully articulate the demands of the rhetorical situation and define precisely what response to that situation is appropriate.  The prompt engineering method of creating precise writing instructions, contextualizing those instructions with detail about rhetorical situation, and describing the desired output can help a writer generate text, revise existing text, or give good feedback to other writers.  Prompt engineering can help with writing and revision at all levels, from drafting the entire document to the revision of sentences.

Kirsten Davis teaches at Stetson University College of Law and in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She is the Co-Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication. The Institute’s mission is to study legal communication issues and provide programming and training that improves legal communication skills. Among other things she’s up to right now, she’s currently working on a writing handbook written specifically for trial lawyers. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not intended to be legal advice. You can reach Dr. Davis at [email protected].

ChatGPT and Legal Writing

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can, among other things, compose music, play games, and generate student essays and examination answers. Indeed, ChatGPT has already been studied to assess its efficacy on law school examinations. One study, for example, revealed that ChatGPT passed four law school exams at the University of Minnesota -- earning an average grade of C+ -- and an exam at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.[1]

The leader of the study examining ChatGPT in the law school performance context stated that “[a]lone, ChatGPT would be a pretty mediocre law student," and emphasized that “the bigger potential for the profession here is that a lawyer could use ChatGPT to produce a rough first draft and just make their practice that much more effective.”[2]

Certainly, in law school and in the legal profession, ChatGPT can have benefits. For example, ChatGPT can enhance efficiency by, for example, producing rough drafts of basic legal documents such as complaints, memorandums, interrogatories, and document requests.  Additionally, ChatGPT can assist individuals who cannot afford legal services in producing competent legal documents.

What ChatGPT cannot do, however, is teach law students how to think, how to write, and how to persuade. That, in a nutshell, is the point – and the problem. Below are two concerns regarding ChatGPT’s effects on law school and the legal profession.

1.    Law students need to learn how to think critically.

Learning how to think critically is among the most important skills needed to be a competent lawyer. And in recent years, many students begin their first year of law school lacking this skill. Thus, during the first year of law school, particularly in doctrinal and legal writing courses, students learn, among other things, how to read cases, understand complex legal concepts, synthesize the law, and apply the law to different fact patterns.

ChatGPT is problematic because, in some contexts, it does the thinking for the students. In so doing, it enables students (to some extent) to avoid the admittedly arduous process of understanding and interpreting complex legal doctrines, and presenting such doctrines (e.g., in a memorandum or a brief) in an understandable, logical, and persuasive manner. Indeed, David Kemp, an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, stated that “[i]f you’re asking it to organize several concepts, or are struggling to explain something in a way that’s really understandable, it can help.”[3]

That, again, is the point – and the problem.

Students should not be relying on artificial intelligence to organize complex legal concepts or explain them in a way that readers can understand. They should, through hard work and perseverance, develop critical thinking skills so that they can do it themselves. Otherwise, we are training students to rely not on their minds or their legal training, but on a technology that, at best, produces mediocre results.

Perhaps some would describe this as an “old school” approach to legal education. And they would be right. The quality of law students at many law schools has steadily declined in recent years, and ChatGPT threatens to worsen this problem by doing for law students what they should, after three years of legal training, be able to do for themselves.

2.    Law students need to learn how to write competently and persuasively.

It is no secret that judges and lawyers often criticize law graduates for their poor writing skills.[4] The reasons for this include, but are not limited to, insufficient preparation during students' undergraduate coursework, and insufficient dedication to required legal writing courses in law school.

This fact, however, only underscores the need to train students to think – and write – like lawyers. Students need to learn, for example, how to research the law, how to craft a compelling narrative, how to synthesize legal authority, how to reconcile unfavorable facts and law, and how to draft an organized and well-structured legal argument.

To do so, students need to embrace the writing process, which involves writing, rewriting, and editing. It requires critical thinking. Hard work. Perseverance. And the ability to write effectively and persuasively. ChatGPT is not going to teach students how to do this because, at least to some extent, it will do it for them. That makes the problem worse, not better.

To be sure, ChatGPT may produce the equivalent of a mediocre first draft, which students will then edit and re-edit to improve its quality. But good legal writing is not simply about editing. To be an excellent editor, you must first be an excellent writer and re-writer. That means embracing the writing process and acquiring the skills needed to draft, for example, a persuasive motion or appellate brief. As one professor explains.

Legal writing faculty interviewed by the ABA Journal agree that ChatGPT writing can model good sentence structure and paragraph structure. However, some fear that it could detract from students learning good writing skills. ‘If students do not know how to produce their own well-written analysis, they will not pass the bar exam,’ says April Dawson, a professor and associate dean of technology and innovation at the North Carolina Central University School of Law.’[5]

Professor Dawson may be correct that ChatGPT will reduce bar passage rates. What it will almost certainly do is ensure that students never become excellent persuasive writers. And it will also cause some students to rely on ChatGPT to do the hard work that they should be doing, and that is necessary, to produce quality legal work.  This is the risk that reliance on ChatGPT – particularly for complex legal motions and briefs – engenders.

Ultimately, ChatGPT can certainly have benefits. Among those is increasing efficiency and productivity. But law students still need to have the analytical thinking and writing skills to be able to interpret complex legal texts, draft persuasive legal arguments, and present compelling arguments before a court.  As such, ChatGPT’s benefits must be balanced against the need to train students to think, write, and practice like lawyers.

Perhaps this is an “old school” approach, but that approach has produced extraordinary attorneys who have transformed the law and the legal profession through their advocacy.

Simply put, you cannot replace an intelligent, thinking human being.

 

[1] See Samantha Murphy Kelly, “Chat GPT Passes Exams from Law and Business Schools” (January 26, 2023), available at: ChatGPT passes exams from law and business schools | CNN Business

[2] Reuters, “Chat GPT Passes Law School Exams Despite ‘Mediocre’ Performance” (January 25, 2023) available at: ChatGPT passes law school exams despite 'mediocre' performance | Reuters.

[3] Kelly, supra note 1.

[4] See Ann Nowak, The Struggle with Basic Writing Skills (March 1, 2021), available at: The Struggle with Basic Writing Skills | Published in Legal Writing (legalwritingjournal.org)

[5] Kelly, supra note 1.

The Rhetoric of ChatGPT: What ChatGPT Had to Say About Its Connection to Rhetoric and What We Can Learn from That Response

Thursday’s Rhaw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

The Rhetoric of ChatGPT:  What ChatGPT Had to Say About Its Connection to Rhetoric and What We Can Learn from That Response

I’ve been thinking about what ChatGPT might mean for the practice of appellate lawyers and their ability to be persuasive.  So, I typed this as a prompt for ChatGPT:

 I am writing a blog post for an audience of appellate lawyers. What should I tell them about the relationship between rhetoric and ChatGPT?

Here’s what ChatGPT replied:

Rhetoric is the art of using language effectively to persuade or influence an audience. In many ways, ChatGPT can be seen as an extension of this art, as it uses natural language processing to generate persuasive and compelling responses to a wide range of prompts.

One of the key advantages of using ChatGPT for rhetorical purposes is its ability to quickly generate high-quality content in a wide range of styles and formats. This can be particularly useful for appellate lawyers, who need to produce persuasive legal arguments and compelling briefs that are tailored to the specific needs of their clients.

At the same time, it's important to remember that ChatGPT is a machine learning model, and as such, it has limitations. While it can generate persuasive responses based on patterns it has learned from large volumes of text data, it cannot understand the nuances of human emotion, context, or intent in the same way that a human being can.

This means that appellate lawyers who use ChatGPT for rhetorical purposes must be careful to ensure that the responses generated by the model are appropriate and effective for their intended audience. They should also be aware that the use of ChatGPT in legal writing is still a relatively new and evolving area, and that best practices are still being developed.

Overall, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for appellate lawyers looking to enhance their rhetorical skills and produce high-quality legal content. By using the model in conjunction with their own expertise and insights, lawyers can create persuasive and compelling arguments that effectively convey their clients' positions.

Analyzing ChatGPT’s Response

Not a bad response, generally speaking. But what has ChatGPT revealed about itself?  Here’s a brief analysis of some things we can learn about ChatGPT from this response.

            ChatGPT Might Assume Too Much About the Reader

ChatGPT starts with a correct definition of rhetoric and then asserts that ChatGPT is an extension of rhetoric because it uses natural language processing (NLP). But ChatGPT assumes the reader knows what NLP is.  (And later it assumes that the reader knows what a “language processing model” is.)   If you don’t know (I didn’t) what NLP is, here’s a quick definition sourced from IBM:

NLP combines computational linguistics—rule-based modeling of human language—with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Together, these technologies enable computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to ‘understand’ its full meaning, complete with the speaker or writer’s intent and sentiment.

So, one thing we learn about ChatGPT from this passage is that it can wrongly assume a reader’s knowledge, something lawyers know better than to do. While we might think that better engineering of ChatGPT’s prompt would solve the problem, recall that I told ChatGPT the audience for whom I was writing. That specific detail in the prompt did not seem to make a difference in ChatGPT understanding that many members of the intended audience would have limited knowledge of the computer science terms associated with ChatGPT. 

            ChatGPT Thinks of Itself as “Art”

I’m intrigued that ChatGPT chose the term “art” when describing itself as an “extension” of rhetoric.  This characterization seems counterintuitive because ChatGPT is the product of computer, data, and language science.  Yet, ChatGPT suggests that because NLP is a human-like effort to understand the meaning of language (as the definition above reflects), ChatGPT sees itself as an “artistic” endeavor, at least regarding persuasion.  And, at least in some cases, ChatGPT has proven that to be true--there’s something that feels like artistry in ChatGPT’s responses to prompts.  (See, e.g., this poem by ChatGPT and the debate around whether ChatGPT’s poetry is “art.”)

If ChatGPT sees itself as art rather than science, then we should take it at its word and think of it as we do art and artists.  That is, as do artists, ChatGPT brings a particular perspective to its responses.  As such, ChatGPT’s response is a form of art—and only one of many responses available.  Just like painters and sculptors can interpret their objects of study differently, ChatGPT’s interpretation of data in a particular response is one of many.  Thinking of this another way, we might view ChatGPT’s responses to prompts as opinions, subject to issues of perspective, interpretation, accuracy, bias, and incompleteness.

            ChatGPT Speaks Like It Wants to Sell You Something, but Should You Buy It?

Although I asked ChatGPT to describe a relationship between two things, ChatGPT’s response feels more like a sales pitch. It makes grand, authoritative-sounding claims about ChatGPT’s value to the user.  It is confident that it can help lawyers persuade and compel by providing “high-quality content in a wide range of styles and formats.”  ChatGPT reminds us that it has “key advantages,” that it can enhance the lawyer’s persuasive skill, and that it can generate high-quality content that can be tailored to client’s needs.

Why might ChatGPT sound so confident?  Maybe ChatGPT’s confidence comes from the way it generates responses.  ChatGPT generates responses by examining a vast amount of data, looking for the patterns and relationships between words in the sample, and then predicting what response is appropriate for the context.  Perhaps because I told it I was writing a blog post, the texts that ChatGPT accessed for context were blogs, and because many blogs are written in a tone designed to sell something, this caused ChatGPT to adopt the same tone by predicting that I was expecting that tone in the response.

Regardless of the reason, this extra-confident tone of the response should give us a reason to scrutinize ChatGPT’s claims more carefully.  If we read closely, we see that the response doesn’t really explains what “high-quality content” means.  On one hand, commentators point out that ChatGPT cannot tell the difference between true and false information and thus can deliver inaccurate responses.  This aspect of ChatGPT, then, is not “high-quality.”  Moreover, ChatGPT’s ability to sound very confident in its responses can lure readers into believing the responses’ truth.  For lawyers, this inaccurate information expressed in a confident tone is a malpractice minefield.  For example, one would not want to rely at face value on what ChatGPT says about some point of law.  (It’s probably useful to remind those in your office who could use ChatGPT of this important point.)

On the other hand, ChatGPT arguably can offer something of high(er) quality in that it can produce a “wide variety of styles and formats.”  You can prompt ChatGPT to write in a particular style—even your own!  You can request it write content in the style and organization of a brief or a motion, and it will comply.  You can ask it to assist in correcting your grammar.  It’s pretty good at offering examples of different genres, styles, and tones of writing.  This is because it is good at providing an approximation of whatever you’ve asked it to create based upon the patterns it recognizes in the dataset.

But here’s the catch, I think, with using ChatGPT to generate “style and format” content: the user must already understand the style and structure he or she seeks in order to evaluate the quality of ChatGPT’s response.  In other words, if you don’t know already what a case caption for, say, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit looks like, how can you be sure ChatGPT will give you the right format for that caption?  Likewise, if you aren’t sure what a good introduction to an appellate brief looks like, how can you know if ChatGPT has given you a good one in its response?   ChatGPT would be good at giving you examples, but it can’t really tell you which one is “best” in your circumstances.

            ChatGPT Knows Its Rhetorical Limits

Even though ChatGPT is confident in its capabilities, it admits that it has limits.  Specifically, ChatGPT responds that it cannot understand emotion, context, or intent like a human does when crafting responses to persuade. This is a pretty significant admission.  To be limited in these ways is relevant to ChatGPT’s persuasive abilities; understanding emotion, content, and intent are elements of human communication that are central to rhetorical effectiveness.  So, even though ChatGPT sees itself as an “extension” of rhetoric, it is a fairly limited extension.

 ChatGPT reminds us that one of its limitations is that it generates persuasion from finding patterns in large amounts of existing data.  So, that raises the problem of “garbage in,” “garbage out.”  In other words, the quality of ChatGPT’s responses is only as good as the data it can access.  That is, if the dataset has both helpful and unhelpful patterns that inform ChatGPT’s responses, how does one know if what ChatGPT generated is something worth relying on?  The only way to know is to already have the knowledge essential to evaluating the response.

            In the End, ChatGPT is Deferential about Its Writing

ChatGPT says it is the appellate lawyer’s job to ensure what ChatGPT writes is effective for the intended audience.  It talks about itself as a “model” that can help lawyers be persuasive and reminds lawyers that the model should be used in conjunction with lawyers’ expertise and insights.  In other words, ChatGPT does not take the position that it replaces humans in the writing process—particularly where audience analysis and professional expertise is involved.  Here, ChatGPT makes a significant rhetorical move—it reminds you that the technology is only as good as its user and, even after all of its confidence above, disclaims responsibility for the usefulness of its output. Fascinating.

Some Takeaways

ChatGPT notes that it is new enough that “best practices” for using ChatGPT in legal writing are still being developed. I take this as a challenge!  Based upon ChatGPT’s rhetoric (i.e., the way it uses language to talk about itself), I’ll propose some best practices for you:

• Do not be misled by ChatGPT’s confidence. ChatGPT sounds confident and authoritative in its responses, but users should be skeptical about the legitimacy of that confidence.
• Rely on your own expertise, not ChatGPT’s. Appellate lawyers (and staff working for them) need to have an existing knowledge base to evaluate ChatGPT’s responses.  In particular, evaluating the appropriateness of the response for an audience is essential.  As with all aspects of outsourcing judgment in legal practice, outsourcing judgment to ChatGPT is dangerous.  At the very least, for appellate lawyers to use ChatGPT effectively, they will need to become familiar with prompt engineering techniques that make ChatGPT more expert in the field and thus arguably improve ChatGPT’s responses.
• Treat ChatGPT as opinionated, not authoritative. Although ChatGPT is the product of science, ChatGPT should be seen as an artistic process, generating content that is more like opinion than unassailable fact.  Treat ChatGPT as conversation partner, muse, or collaborator than can help you “play” with ideas and text.  (Check out Ian Bogost’s article insightfully concluding that “ChatGPT  . . . doesn’t understand or even compose text. It offers a way to probe text, to play with text, to mold and shape an infinity of prose across a huge variety of domains . . . into structures in which further questions can be asked and, on occasion, answered.)
• Remember that ChatGPT relies on pattern recognition, a limited mode of persuasion. ChatGPT does not have all the rhetorical capabilities of humans but can recognize patterns in data that might have persuasive impact.  Even if that pattern recognition is persuasive, users must remember to look at persuasion from all aspects of the human experience, not just in the ways that ChatGPT looks at it.
• Remember that ChatGPT does not guarantee competent writing, you do. At bottom, ChatGPT does not claim it is superior to you in writing ability but rather it remains deferential to your experience and expertise. It disclaims its ability to effectively write for your “local” audience.  No one—not even a computer—knows your clients, your arguments, and your audience better than you do.  Rely on your own judgment about competent writing.

What are your thoughts?

Kirsten Davis teaches at Stetson University College of Law and in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She is the Co-Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication. The Institute’s mission is to study legal communication issues and provide programming and training that improves legal communication skills. Among other things she’s up to right now, she’s currently working on a writing handbook written specifically for trial lawyers. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not intended to be legal advice. You can reach Dr. Davis at [email protected].

2022 Top Legal Terms Include “Complicit Bias,” “False Narrative,” and “Nuclear Option,” According to Burton’s Legal Thesaurus

Happy December!  Whether you are scrambling to finish grading, like me, or wishing for a holiday with no emergency writs or motions, I hope you are enjoying the many lists of odd and interesting things lawyers did in 2022.  Recently, I saw the newest edition of Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, the Fortieth Anniversary/Sixth Edition, and the editors have added some intriguing new terms as top legal phrases in 2022.

For example:  “Attorneys were busy discussing ‘complicit bias,’ arguing about ‘lawfare’ and discussing the ‘great reshuffle’ this past year, according to Burton's Legal Thesaurus, which released its list of 2022's top new legal terms.”  Karp, “Meme Stock,” “Quiet Quitting” Among Top New Legal Terms, Law360 (Dec. 13, 2022).   “Complicit bias” means “community complicity in sustaining institutional bias and harassment in the workplace.”  See Michele Goodwin, Complicit Bias: Sexual Harassment and the Communities that Sustain It, Huffington Post (Dec. 11, 2017) (credited with creating this new term). 

Other neat new terms include “False Narrative” and “Nuclear Option.”  “False narrative” is a noun, according to Burton’s, and unsurprisingly means:  “a contrived story, artifice,” and “distortion of truth.”  Burton’s confirms the political root of “nuclear option,” defining it as a noun meaning “abolish the filibuster, change in voting, change to majority vote for passage in the US Senate,” or “drastic action, extreme action.”  In a recent Sixth Circuit case showing one way lawyers are using the term, the court found no abuse of discretion where the district court “allowed [a party] to introduce its [opponents'] threats to stop shipping parts into evidence and to compare those threats to a ‘nuclear option.’”  Stackpole Int'l Engineered Prods. v. Angstrom Auto. Grp., LLC, 52 F.4th 274, 284-85 (6th Cir. 2022).

Burton’s contains over 3,000 pages of definitions, but Debra Cassens Weiss summarized some other new items from Burton’s 2022 Top Ten list, including:  “‘Lawfare,’ meaning the use of legal proceedings to damage an adversary; [t]he ‘Great Reshuffle’ a variation of ‘Great Resignation,’ referring to people leaving jobs; [and] ‘Movement law,’ an approach to legal scholarships that works with social movements, rather than simply studying them.”  Cassens Weiss, 'Complicit bias' and 'lawfare' among top new legal terms in 2022, ABA Journal (Dec. 14, 2022).  Cassens Weiss also explained:  “Margaret Wu, a legal writing professor at the University of California at Berkely School of Law, is chair of the Select Committee on Terminology of Burton’s Legal Thesaurus,” and “Wu told Law360 . . . ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, “sea changes” at the Supreme Court, diversity and equity initiatives and technology” influenced this year’s terms. 

In its pitch for Burton’s Sixth Edition, LexisNexis explains:  “As Justice William O. Douglas penned in his 1979 foreword to Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, ‘[t]he root of all language is individual word. Often, it is the use of a specific word or term upon which a case or controversy may hinge. It is through the use of such a tool as the Legal Thesaurus that one may find the precise term to fit the nuances of a particular situation.’”   Whatever resources you use to find perfect words this month, I wish you happy writing and happy holidays.

History Rewritten to Serve Selfish Ends – and Serve an Argument

 

Quite appropriately, Moore v. Harper, the upcoming Supreme Court case that tests the validity of the “independent state legislature” theory, has set off alarm bells about the future of democracy in the United States. The theory holds that state legislatures hold exclusive authority to make decisions about congressional elections, unless overridden by Congress, based on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1. The Clause designates Congress and the states as holding responsibility to set the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.” Restrictions on state legislative authority imposed by a state constitution, including judicial enforcement of equal voting and non-discrimination mandates, the theory holds, must give way, rendering the state legislative determinations immune from judicial review, under the theory. When combined with Article II, Section 1, which assigns the manner for appointing presidential electors to state legislatures as well, the election denialism that has become a standard feature of the Trump political era could gain a permanent constitutionally blessed footing, potentially allowing state legislatures to overturn voters’ choices and name its majority party’s candidates the winners.

Today, however, one day after the Constitution’s 235^th anniversary, my topic is not how the “independent state legislature” theory realizes Justice Robert Jackson’s fear that the courts would read the Constitution in such a rigid insensible way that it becomes a “suicide pact.”[1] Instead, I want to focus on the North Carolina legislature’s use of history to support its argument as petitioner in the case. Given the originalist outlook that dominates the Supreme Court, it is unsurprising that parties appeal to history to support their desire outcome. What separates this brief from the usual attempt to invoke history, is its reliance on a widely debunked document to advance its cause.

The Petitioner’s opening brief tells the Court not to look at James Madison’s Virginia Plan for how to conduct federal elections because it is silent on the issue. Instead, it invokes the “alternative ‘Pinckney Plan,’” which contains remarkably similar language to what the Constitution says and is denominated in the brief as the “progenitor” of the Elections Clause. Because no other document that the Committee of Detail may have reviewed contained any plan similar in kind, the brief calls the Pinkney Plan confirmation of a deliberate choice to cede authority to the legislature.

The brief overlooks the fact that the original Pinckney Plan did not survive the Constitutional Convention and is lost to history. In a new article in Politico, Ethan Herenstein and Brian Palmer of the Brennan Center for Justice, explain that the “Pinkney Plan” is actually an 1818 draft by Charles Pinckney that was a revisionist attempt to claim more credit for the Constitution than Pinckney deserved.[2] As Herenstein and Palmer put it, during the Constitutional Convention, the records show that “the framers hardly discussed Pinckney’s plan and, at key moments, rejected his views during the debates.” They go on to cite James Madison’s reaction as “perplexed” by the document Pinckney released in 1818 “because he was ‘perfectly confident’” the new document “was ‘not the draft originally presented to the convention by Mr. Pinckney.’”

Madison noted that the similarity of language to the Constitution’s final text could not have been part of a plan at the Convention because framers hammered out its wording through long running internal debates that would not have occurred if a plan had already spelled them out. Moreover, Pinckney’s well-known positions at the Convention were at odds with what he now claimed to have proposed. For example, at the Convention, Pinckney argued that state legislatures should elect members of the House, but his 1818 document purports to show he favored popular election.[3]

Herenstein and Palmer assert that “nearly every serious historian agrees that the 1818 document is a fake.” They quote historian John Franklin Jameson’s statement in 1903 that the so-called draft was “so utterly discredited that no instructed person will use it as it stands as a basis for constitutional or historical reasoning.” Another researcher they quote called it “the most intractable constitutional con in history.”

Substantial additional support exists to doubt the veracity of the Pinckney Plan. Madison suggested that Pinckney rewrote his own plan weaving in passages from the Constitution, and that the intervention of 30 years made Pinckney’s memory of what was his and what was not flawed. Others put it less kindly. Historians, more than a century ago, described the document as a “pseudo draft” that “should be relegated to the depository of historical lies.”[4] Clinton Rossiter’s respected history of the Constitutional Convention written in 1966 simply dubbed it a “fraudulent document.”[5]

The reason the 1818 document exists is because Congress overrode the Framers’ own decision to keep their deliberations secret. President Monroe dispatched Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to assemble the records. While he found mention of a plan by Pinckney, no such document existed. He asked Pinckney for a copy, In Pinckney’s response, he claimed to have four or five drafts of the Plan but did not know which most accurately reflected his original plan and how much his re-writes changed the plan as his own views had changed over time.[6] The Petitioner’s brief recounts none of this history, but instead treats the document as authoritative.

Every state has adopted the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which requires candor to the tribunal. It prohibits a lawyer from making “a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal or fail[ing] to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer.”[7] The lack of candor in this brief may violate the Rule.

Will there be consequences to the use of this document or a failure to suggest its questionable providence? I doubt it. Will a member of the Court or even a majority cite it as authoritative as the petitioner has? Unfortunately, that seems likely. In responding to the historical basis for the end-of-the-term abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org.,[8] the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians expressed dismay that their amicus brief’s description of the relevant history was not taken “seriously” and that the Court instead “adopted a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than 30 years.”[9] Similarly, in SCOTUSblog, Saul Cornell, a Fordham University historian, called the history relied upon by the majority in the Second Amendment case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen,[10] “a version of the past that is little more than an ideological fantasy, much of it invented by gun-rights advocates and their libertarian allies in the legal academy with the express purpose of bolstering litigation.”[11]

Regardless of whether these assessments are over-the-top or shaded by a predisposition on the underlying issue, the concern that history is manipulated to achieve an end applies with greater force to the courts.  Even as strong an advocate of originalism as Justice Scalia was worried that selective use of past events could predominate because “history, as much as any other interpretive method, leaves ample discretion to “loo[k] over the heads of the [crowd] for one’s friends.”[12] The danger is not just that an important issue is settled by a skewed view of history. It is also that the re-written history appears in an authoritative text that now controls future precedent and even the nature of future issues as though settled.

If, for example, a majority of the Court were to rely on Charles Pinckney’s 1818 document as reflecting what the framers of the Constitution might have thought, not only could they reach the wrong result, it would create an even greater schism in this country on the essential form of our republic, reading the Constitution as mandating what would surely be a suicide pact. And when a future, indisputably valid election is overturned, the courts may have nothing to say about the legislative coup that took place.

More trivially, another consequence would be to achieve the project that Charles Pinckney set for himself: a revision of history that would make him the true father of the Constitution – and a title he did not desire as the Constitution’s grim reaper.

 

[1] Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 37 (1949) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

[2] Ethan Herenstein and Brian Palmer, “Fraudulent Document Cited in Supreme Court Bid to Torch Election Law,” Politico Mag. (Sept. 15, 2022, available at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810.

[3] 9 The Writings of James Madison 553-54 (Gaillard Hunt ed., 1910).

[4] Dotan Oliar, The (Constitutional) Convention on IP: A New Reading, 57 UCLA L. Rev. 421, 479 n.39 (2009).

[5] Id. (quoting Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention 331 n.* (1966)).

[6] Id. (citing Letter from Charles Pinckney to John Quincy Adams (Dec. 30, 1818), in 3 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 427-28 (Max Farrand ed., 1911).

[7] Model R. of Prof. Conduct 3.3.

[8] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org., 142 S. Ct. 2228 (2022).

[9] History, the Supreme Court, and Dobbs v. Jackson: Joint Statement from the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians (July 2022), available at https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/history-the-supreme-court-and-dobbs-v-jackson-joint-statement-from-the-aha-and-the-oah-(july-2022).

[10] New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022).

[11] Saul Cornell, Cherry-picked history and ideology-driven outcomes: Bruen’s originalist distortions, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 27, 2022, 5:05 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/cherry-picked-history-and-ideology-driven-outcomes-bruens-originalist-distortions/.

[12] Antonin Scalia & Bryan Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 377 (2012).

Presenting Issues as an Advocate

Last week, I responded to a noticeably short opening brief in an interlocutory appeal that sought to make the issue a simple one. That brief mustered little authority and asserted a purely legal question reflected in the relevant law’s text. In framing the issue, the brief stated it neutrally as though the brief would provide a learned disquisition that would enable the court to answer the question, rather than advocacy of a particular result. Of course, the body of the brief pushed a singular point of view. The question presented, then, did not contribute to the advocacy.

Usually, advocates lose an opportunity when the issue presented does not itself suggest an obvious answer. Judges normally read the issue presented as the first clue about what the case concerns. My brief began with a “restatement” of the issue presented, which emphasized whether the issue merited an answer because of an underlying dispute about the facts. A court does not answer a pure legal question when the answer is merely advisory. The case concerned an immunity for one of two bases for liability. If the other party lacked eligibility for the immunity, as we contended, then the court, under its precedents, lacked jurisdiction to answer the question and should, as it had done in the past, dismiss the appeal as improvidently granted.

In restating the question to pose the problem that a central factual dispute still existed, I led the court into the first section of my brief, where I quoted the court’s own observation that “too often” courts grant review of a pure legal question only to discover upon briefing and argument that facts must first be established before the question becomes ripe. More substantive sections of the brief also worked in the unanswered question of eligibility as confounding to deeper questions about the statute as a whole and limits on the constitutional authority to promulgate the immunity.  

In restating the question as I did, I followed the age-old advice voiced again by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner in Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges: “A well-framed issue statement suggests the outcome you desire.”[1] They follow that statement with an example of the Court’s framing of the issue in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the once-again controversial case of whether Connecticut could prohibit the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.

The authors note that Judge Posner thought the Court might have struggled more with an answer if the question presented were stated as:

We must decide whether the state is constitutionally obligated to allow the sale of goods that facilitate fornication and adultery by making those practices less costly.[2]

Instead, the Court presented the issue as:

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.[3]

Both versions of the question presented suggests an answer. Still, there is a cognizable difference between them that advocates should recognize. The first version, drafted by Judge Posner, makes an appeal to an ideological predisposition by its language that may alienate some judges. A more effective formulation would present the same question in more neutral and less inflammatory terms, as the Court’s decision did. As Scalia and Garner remind us, “you are here to reason with the court and cannot do so successfully if you show yourself to be unreasonable.”[4]

 

[1] Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges 83 (2008).

[2] Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation 305 (1988) (quoted in Scalia and Garner, supra note one, at 84).

[3] Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 453 (1972).

[4] Scalia and Garner, supra note 1, at 84-85.

Putting the Audience First: The Writing Tactic of Restatement

Thursday’s Rhaw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

Putting the Audience First:  The Writing Tactic of Restatement

In May, I wrote the post, Putting the Audience First:  A Perspective on Legal Writing.   In that post, I encouraged readers to adopt a perspective on legal writing that always—always—has at its core the goal of meeting the needs of the actual, imagined, and implied audiences of the document.  (If you haven’t yet read that post, I think it’s worth your time to read it before reading this one.)   In that post, I promised that June’s post would be about the tactics of an audience-first perspective.  Well, June turned out to be terribly unkind to my family; we had a family member with a serious, hospital-stay-causing (but temporary) illness.  So, with apologies, here’s the post I promised for June.

Audience-First Perspective, Effective Writing Choices

In May I wrote that a good legal writer imagines the audience and writes for that audience, anticipating needs and meeting them.  An even better legal writer recognizes that documents also imply an audience; that is, how the document is written suggests an audience for that document.  As such, the work of the writer is not just to anticipate the needs of an audience but to also create needs the writer wants the audience to have and then use the document to satisfy those needs.  Ultimately, writers that meet audience needs are more likely to influence those audiences.  Accordingly, I suggested that the legal writer’s prime directive is this: 

 In a deliberate way and in every writing choice, put the audience first.

This directive to put the audience first should lead the writer to identify and deploy writing tactics—the tools in the writer’s toolbox—that best satisfy audience needs.  One tactic that cuts across different types of documents and purposes for writing is the rhetorical tool of restatement.

Restatement as a Tactic of Audience-First Writing

Restatement as a writing tactic is a way of calling attention to a concept, point, or idea by stating that information in a different form, one that is often more convincing, clear, or both.  Restatement is a powerful rhetorical tactic for satisfying the needs of audiences because restatement can

• Emphasize important ideas;
• Enable the audience to more easily remember important ideas;
• Clarify concepts that might be confusing to the audience; and
• Add a gloss on concepts or ideas that convey emotion or theme to the audience.

Signposts should accompany restatements.  Good signposts for restated information include

• In other words
• That is
• Stated another way.

Each of these phrases put the audience on notice that what follows is the restatement of the same idea in a new way. (In general, it’s almost always true that you should put your reader on notice of your next writing move. That’s why transitions are so important to understandable writing.)

Examples of Restatement from Appellate Briefs

Here's an example of restatement in an amicus brief in Axon Enterprise, Inc. v Federal Trade Commission.  The question in this case is whether the federal district courts have jurisdiction to hear constitutional challenges to the FTC’s “structure, procedures, and existence.”  Pay particular attention to what happens in the second sentence below:

Thus, “if one part” of government “should, at any time, usurp more power than the constitution gives, or make an improper use of its constitutional power, one or both of the other parts may correct the abuse, or may check the usurpation.” Id. at 707–08. Each branch, in other words, must ensure that the others stay in their constitutional lanes.

This excerpt is a good example for seeing how restatement can be an audience-centered rhetorical tool.  The brief apparently uses restatement because the quoted language in the first sentence is somewhat complicated. This complication is in part because the quote is from 1791 and because the quote is addressing how the branches of government operate under the U.S. Constitution.  In some situations, writers would want to avoid a quote like this and paraphrase the ideas within the quote. The paraphrase is a “shortcut” for getting to the essential meaning the writer wants to convey when the original language is complex. 

So, why would a brief include a complicated quote?  One explanation is that a writer might think a quote is persuasive because quote’s author is meaningful to the brief’s readers.  That might explain the quote in this brief.  Here, the quote is from James Wilson’s 1791 lectures on law at the College of Philadelphia.  Wilson had participated in drafting the Constitution and had served as a United States Supreme Court Justice. His lectures addressed the U.S. Constitution and the way in which the federal government described within it operated. So, by including Wilson’s quote, the brief appeals to Wilson’s exact words as well as his ethos.

The brief keeps the original ideas in Wilson’s mouth, so to speak.  But by retaining the more complicated quote, the brief also creates a need in the audience to have clarity on what the quote means.  In this brief, clarity is accomplished with a short, punchy sentence that conveys the key point in a more emphatic and more memorable way and puts a gloss on the quoted language’s meaning:

Each branch, in other words, must ensure that the others stay in their constitutional lanes.

By using the phrase “in other words,” the brief signals to the reader that the sentence is a restatement.  Then the sentence restates Wilson’s quote in a more accessible way, by modifying a commonly used phrase, “stay in your lane,” to sum up what the quoted language directs the branches to do.  This restatement reduces complexity and it gives a reader a way to more easily remember the overarching concept about the roles of the separate branches.

 There’s also an emotional valence to the restatement—this is the gloss.  The metaphor of staying in one’s lane gives a modern vibe to an old idea.  Merriam-Webster says that “to stay in your own lane” “comes from football . . . where [it] is viewed as advice to worry about your own assignment and not take on the job of defending a different opponent, which can lead to blown coverages and chaos.” In addition, the phrase can mean to stick to your own area of expertise or to maintain your car in a particular lane of the highway.

Even if a reader doesn’t know these exact meanings, a reader is likely to feel the sense of orderliness and security that comes from staying in one’s own lane and getting the job done.  This feeling, perhaps, is the feeling the brief is hoping for in its audience—that it is good for each branch to ensure that the others stay within the confines of their own expertise.  As such, the restatement provides less complex and more memorable language that has an emotional “feel.”

Beyond satisfying the need of court audiences to easily grasp the content of briefs, restatement can be effective for speaking to other brief audiences.  Imagine the news headline that emphasizes the restatement:  Case asks whether branches must help others “stay in constitutional lanes.”  In other words, a simplified restatement could meet the needs of audiences to express a complicated legal idea in everyday language.

Here’s another example that presents a similar pattern of restatement.  This one is from the of the Brief for Petitioner in The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. Again, pay attention to the end of the paragraph.

Copyright ultimately rests on a “pragmatic,” utilitarian bargain: “[S]ociety confers monopoly exploitation benefits for a limited duration on authors and artists” to incentivize and promote “the intellectual and practical enrichment that results from such creative endeavors.” Leval 1109; see also Google, 141 S. Ct. at 1195 (noting that copyrights are granted “not as a special reward” to creators, but rather “to encourage the production of works that others might reproduce more cheaply”); Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters. 471 U.S. 539, 545 (1985) (copyright protection is “intended to increase and not to impede the harvest of knowledge”); supra at 4. In other words, copyright protection for creators serves the ultimate end of securing for the public a rich marketplace of ideas.

The Warhol case presents a question under copyright law’s fair use doctrine: whether Andy Warhol sufficiently “transformed” another person’s photographs when he used those photographs in his own artworks.  In the paragraph above, The Warhol Foundation’s brief makes an argument that copyright is not so much about the protection of artists and authors but about giving society the benefits of its citizens’ creative work.  The brief faces a bit of a challenge with this point; true, the precedents say that society is meant to benefit from copyright, but the precedents also say that creators are meant to benefit, too.  In other words, the first two sentences of the paragraph point in two directions at once, which makes it less clear what point the reader is to take away from that information.  But the brief does not allow that confusion to persist.  By invoking the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, the brief emphatically guides the audience to focus in one direction, on society’s benefit: 

In other words, copyright protection for creators serves the ultimate end of securing for the public a rich marketplace of ideas.

Is there anything special about the “marketplace of ideas” as an element of restatement here?  Generally speaking, the marketplace of ideas is a powerful metaphor in American culture. As Schultz and Hudson note, the phrase is “perhaps the most pervasive metaphor to justify broad protections for free speech” and was invoked most recognizably in Justice Holmes’ dissent in the First Amendment case of Abrams v. United States in 1911.  A quick Google search shows that the metaphor also has broad, popular appeal as a shorthand for describing prevailing values about how ideas should circulate in public discourse.  For better or worse, the marketplace of ideas evokes a set of commitments and emotions that influence how readers might think about Warhol’s use of another photographer’s work.

Because of the strong pull of the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, this brief provides a useful example of how a restatement has potential to create a need for a brief’s audience.  Here, I think, the use of the marketplace of ideas metaphor implies an audience that needs to see how arguments about fair use and copyright relate to the marketplace of ideas concept.  In other words, the marketplace of ideas may not have been on the audience’s mind until the brief suggested to the audience that the marketplace of ideas is relevant here.  The use of the metaphor in restatement cements that connection and sets up the opportunity for the brief to meet that implied audience’s needs.

The Recap

Restatement as a rhetorical tactic can help writers craft documents that are clearer and more understandable for audiences.  Writers can direct readers to what ideas are most important and distill for audiences the essence and emotional valence of complicated concepts. 

What do you think about restatement?

Kirsten Davis teaches at Stetson University College of Law and in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She is the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication. The Institute’s mission is to study legal communication issues and provide programming and training that improves legal communication skills. Among other things she did this summer, she presented a CLE on Modern Legal Writing at the South Dakota Bar Annual Conference. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not intended to be legal advice. You can reach Dr. Davis at [email protected].

The Hallmarks of a Great Appellate Brief

Writing an excellent appellate brief is an arduous task. The quality of your writing, coupled with how you organize and present your arguments, can make the difference between winning and losing. Below are a few tips that can enhance the persuasive value of your appellate brief.

1.    Start strong and get to the point quickly.

Writing an appellate brief is, in many ways, like writing a fiction novel or directing a movie. Great books and movies begin powerfully, with a riveting opening chapter or scene. Likewise, in an appellate brief, you should begin with a persuasive introduction that captures the reader’s attention and that does the following:

• Tells the court in one sentence why you should win.
• States clearly what remedy you are seeking.
• Explains why the court should rule in your favor.
• Presents the strongest facts and legal authority that support your argument.

Drafting a powerful, persuasive, and concise introduction is your first – and often most important – opportunity to convince a court to rule in your favor. 

2.    Focus on the facts.

In most instances, the facts – not the law -- win cases.

An outstanding appellate brief, like a great fiction novel or academy award-winning movie, tells a compelling story. That story, among other things, is well-written, flows logically, keeps the reader’s attention, emphasizes the facts most favorable to your position, explains why unfavorable facts do not affect the outcome you seek, and demonstrates why a ruling in your favor is the fairest and most just result.

To be sure, laws, statutes, and constitutional provisions are often broadly worded and subject the different interpretations, and precedent is usually distinguishable. For example, determining whether a particular search is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, or whether a punishment is cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, depends substantially on the court’s independent judgment and, to a lesser extent, subjective values.

As such, a court’s ruling is likely to turn on the facts of each case, which makes your statement of facts the most critical section of your brief. A powerful statement of facts, like a compelling introduction, can often determine your likelihood of winning.

3.    Adopt a more objective tone.

Appellate judges understand that your job is to advocate zealously on your client’s behalf. The best advocacy, however, is often achieved by adopting a more objective tone that does the following:

• Confronts effectively and persuasively the weaknesses in your argument (e.g., by distinguishing unfavorable facts and precedent).
• Explains how a ruling in your favor will affect future cases and litigants.
• Considers the policy implications of a ruling in your favor.
• Addresses institutional considerations, such as how the public might react to a ruling in your favor.
• Acknowledges the merits of the adversary’s argument but explains why your argument produces the most desirable result.

Focusing on these issues will enhance your credibility with the court and demonstrate that you have fully considered the competing factual, legal, and policy aspects of your case.

4.    Break the rules – sometimes.

When writing, rewriting, and revising your brief, do not focus exclusively or even predominantly on, for example, whether every sentence complies with the Texas Manual of Style, whether you have eliminated the passive voice, or whether you avoided using italics or bold.

Instead, focus on whether your story is compelling and consider whether your brief accomplishes the following goals, among others:

• Captures the reader’s attention from the beginning.
• Emphasizes the most favorable facts and law immediately and throughout the brief.
• Appeals to emotion where appropriate.
• Exposes the logical flaws in your adversary’s argument.
• Uses metaphors or other literary devices to enhance persuasion.
• Ends powerfully.

Sometimes, this requires you to break the rules. For example, assume that you are appealing a jury verdict against your client, a popular media personality, on the ground that one of the jurors lied on the jury questionnaire to conceal biases against your client. On appeal, you write the following:

During jury selection, potential jurors were asked whether they harbored any disdain for or bias toward my client, who is a controversial public figure due to his perceived conservative views. Juror No. 16, who was empaneled on the jury, stated that “I do not dislike or have any bias toward the defendant. I respect diverse points of view because they are important to ensuring the free exchange of ideas.” After the jury reached its verdict, however, an article on Juror No. 16’s blog surfaced that stated, “any conservative media commentator should burn in hell, and I would do anything to erase these people from the planet.”  Additionally, one week after the verdict, when Juror No. 16 was questioned about this comment, he stated, “Look, I don’t give a s*** what people say about me. Sometimes, the ends justify the means, and I did what I did because people like that jerk need to be silenced.” Surely, Juror No 16’s first comment unquestionably supports overturning the jury’s verdict. But if there is any doubt, Juror No 16’s second comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This is not perfect, of course, but you get the point. Sometimes, to maximize persuasion, you must break the rules.

5.    Perception is reality – do not make mistakes that undermine your credibility.

Never make mistakes that suggest to the court that you lack credibility. This will occur if your brief contains the following mistakes, among others:

• Spelling errors
• Long sentences (i.e., over twenty-five words)
• Excessively long paragraphs (e.g., one paragraph occupying an entire page)
• Failure to comply with the local court rules
• Over-the-top language (e.g., unnecessary adjectives, insulting the lower court or adversary)
• Inappropriate language (e.g., “the respondent’s arguments are ridiculous and stupid”)
• Fancy or esoteric words (e.g., “the appellant’s meretricious argument ipso facto exacerbates what is an already sophomoric and soporific argument that, inter alia, manifests a duplicitous attempt to obfuscate the apposite issues.”) This sentence is so bad that writing something like this in a brief should be a criminal offense.
• Avoiding unfavorable facts or law
• Requesting relief that the court is not empowered to grant
• Including irrelevant facts or law in your brief (and including unnecessary string cites)

Avoid making these and other mistakes at all costs.

6.    The law will only get you so far; convince the court that it is doing the right thing by ruling for you.

Ask yourself whether your argument produces the fairest and most just result. Judges are human beings. They want to do the right thing. They do not go to sleep at night saying, “I feel so good about my decision today because I made sure that we executed an innocent person.” Put simply, judging is both a legal and moral endeavor. As such, convince a judge that the result you seek is the right result as a matter of law and justice.

Bluebooking

A recurring discussion on #AppellateTwitter and #LegalWriting Twitter is the importance (or lack thereof) of proper citation format. A recent post said that time spent learning to cite properly was not time well spent. I don’t take the author of that post to mean that citations are unimportant, but the view expresses a writer-centric view of citations rather than a reader-centric view. As writers, and particularly as appellate advocates, we must take a reader-centric view of writing. So, let me explain why I think that time spent learning to cite properly is time well spent.

First, and most obviously, your reader needs to be able to easily find what you’re citing. Judges and their law clerks are busy people. Why make it more difficult for the people who you are trying to persuade to find your source? You must do the work so that they don’t have to.

Next, as Professor Alexa Chew explains in Citation Literacy,[1] citations provide the law-trained reader with important information about the weight of the cited authority.[2] Is it binding or only persuasive? Is it a recent case or well-settled law?[3] Is what is being cited from a concurring or dissenting opinion? All of those things matter to the reader. If you omit part of a citation, or worse, incorrectly cite a source, you’re depriving your reader of important information.

Finally, and as Professor Tracy L. M. Norton pointed out in a post responding to the original Tweet, judges and law clerks use adherence to proper citation format as a proxy for your diligence and attention to detail. I know this to be true from my experience as a law clerk and from talking to other law clerks and to judges. A writer who doesn’t take the time to put citations into proper format is often assumed to have neglected other matters in their writing. Because let’s face it, it doesn’t take much effort to format most citations properly. The answers are right there in the citation manual. You just have to spend some time looking them up.

That said, I don’t mean that you are expected to properly format every part of every citation. It won’t matter if the comma is italicized when it shouldn’t be. What I’m suggesting is that it’s important to do your best to properly format citations so that your reader will know that you pay attention to detail. Doing so will reflect well on you and your work.

Oh, and one practical tip. Don’t blindly rely on the “copy with reference” feature of your favorite online legal research platform. The citations produced by those features are not always correct. For example, the Supreme Court of Ohio has its own citation manual. The Ohio “copy with reference” feature of one legal research platform produces this citation for an Ohio trial court case: State v. Vita, 2015 WL 7069789 (Ohio Com.Pl.) The correct citation format is State v. Vita, Clermont C.P. No. 2015 CR 0071, 2015 WL 7069789 (Oct. 29, 2015).

 

[1] Alexa Z. Chew, Citation Literacy, 70 Ark. L. Rev. 869 (2018).

[2] Id. at 872-73.

[3] We’ll leave what “well-settled” law is for another day.

Whither (wither?) Strict Scrutiny?

Professor Gerald Gunther once memorably described strict scrutiny as “‘strict’ in theory and fatal in fact.”[1] And, courts have employed that strict scrutiny to content-based restrictions on free speech,[2] as well as burdens on fundamental rights under both due process[3] and equal protection.[4] It is easy to suppose, even if wrong, that strict scrutiny applies to all fundamental rights.

However, the Supreme Court has adopted different standards for different constitutional rights that make such a knee-jerk response to the presence of a fundamental right the wrong move. For example, the free-exercise clause in a much-criticized decision written by Justice Scalia limited the scope of this protection by requiring the state action to target religion or a religion for different treatment, as opposed to being a valid, neutral law of general applicability.[5] The Seventh Amendment’s jury-trial right also eschews strict scrutiny in favor of a historical test.[6]

Recently, a concurring opinion (to his own majority opinion) by Eleventh Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom speculated on the proper test for the Second Amendment.[7] He rejected one based on levels of scrutiny because the majority in District of Columbia v. Heller[8] expressly shunned any type of “judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry.’”[9] 554 U.S. at 634.

Newsom instead endorsed a view he credits to a Justice Kavanaugh dissent written when Kavanaugh sat on the D.C. Circuit. That opinion stated that “courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”[10] Newsom, though, is not entirely happy with that formulation. He questions its inclusion of “tradition” as a metric.[11] As he explains, if tradition represents the original public meaning, it duplicates what history provides.[12] If it “expand[s] the inquiry beyond the original public meaning—say, to encompass latter-day-but-still-kind-of-old-ish understandings—it misdirects the inquiry.”[13]

Newsom adds a “bookmark for future reflection and inquiry than anything else” to his opinion.[14] He states that it is problematic to reject balancing tests in the context of the Second Amendment, yet still apply it to other fundamental rights. Using the First Amendment as an example, he criticizes the balancing tests adopted there as “so choked with different variations of means-ends tests that one sometimes forgets what the constitutional text even says.”[15] He says that the “doctrine is judge-empowering and, I fear, freedom-diluting.”[16] He suggests that “bigger questions” need to be raised to decide whether applying scrutiny at any level should continue.

The concurrence is provocative and suggests that the roiling of doctrine in other areas of law may extend to how courts should view fundamental rights. However, there is no holy grail that reduces judicial discretion in favor of assuring liberty. Construing constitutional rights is no less subject to manipulation based on a judge’s views if the judge subscribes to the original public meaning school of interpretation, rather than balancing tests. Newsom appears to agree that Heller “was perhaps ‘the most explicitly and self-consciously originalist opinion in the history of the Supreme Court.’”[17] Yet, Heller adopted a historical analysis others have criticized as skewed to obtain a result.[18] Those who expect the pending SCOTUS decision in N.Y. St. Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen[19] before the Supreme Court to invalidate New York’s century-old restrictive gun law recognize that history supporting the type of government authority the statute represents is likely to make little difference to the majority. And, original public meaning cannot reflect our rejection of ideas about race and gender from the founding period.

So, what should we make of Newsom’s concurrence? The opinion seems further evidence that nothing about our approach to constitutional law is settled – and the questioning of strict scrutiny as an interpretative tool is only beginning.

 

[1] Gerald Gunther, The Supreme Court, 1971 Term - Foreword: In Search of Evolving Doctrine on a Changing Court: A Model for a Newer Equal Protection, 86 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 8 (1972).

[2] See City of Austin, Texas v. Reagan Nat’l Advert. of Austin, LLC, 142 S. Ct. 1464, 1471 (2022); Ark. Writers’ Project, Inc. v. Ragland, 481 U.S. 221, 231 (1987).

[3] Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720-21 (1997).

[4] See Massachusetts Bd. of Ret. v. Murgia, 427 U.S. 307, 312 (1976).

[5] Emp. Div., Dep’t of Hum. Res. of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 879 (1990).

[6] Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., 517 U.S. 370, 376 (1996).

[7] United States v. Jimenez-Shilon, No. 20-13139, 2022 WL 1613203, at *7 (11th Cir. May 23, 2022) (Newsom, J., concurring).

[8]  554 U.S. 570 (2008).

[9] Jimenez-Shilon, 2022 WL 1613203, at *8 (Newsom, J., concurring).

[10] Heller v. District of Columbia (Heller II), 670 F.3d 1244, 1271 (D.C. Cir. 2011) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting).

[11] Jimenez-Shilon, 2022 WL 1613203, at *8 n.2 (Newsom, J., concurring).

[12] Id. (Newsom, J., concurring).

[13] Id. (Newsom, J., concurring).

[14] Id. at *9 (Newsom, J., concurring).

[15] Id. at *10(Newsom, J., concurring).

[16] Id. at *11 (Newsom, J., concurring).

[17] Id. at *8 (Newsom, J., concurring) (quoting United States v. Skoien, 614 F.3d 638, 647 (7th Cir. 2010) (en banc) (Sykes, J., dissenting)).

[18] See, e.g., J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law, 95 Va. L. Rev. 253, 254 (2009); Mark Anthony Frassetto, Judging History: How Judicial Discretion in Applying Originalist Methodology Affects the Outcome of Post-Heller Second Amendment Cases, 29 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 413 (2020).

[19] No. 20-843.

Denying Unenumerated Rights

The leaked draft SCOTUS opinion overturning Roe v. Wade[1] shares a hostility to unenumerated rights similar in kind to what some Senators expressed during the confirmation hearing of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Critics often say that unenumerated rights lack legitimacy because they have no specific textual anchors. Instead, the criticism goes, they reflect nothing more than a judge’s political views treated as constitutional gloss – except, of course, when the critic likes the result or cannot deny the right without seeming foolish or racist.

To be sure, Justice Alito’s Dobbs draft did not deny that implied rights exist. After noting that abortion is not in the Constitution, a factual statement that can also be said of separation of powers, Alito limited what he dubbed “implied rights” to those “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,”[2] a judge-made formulation that does not by itself cabin the interpretative exercise and leads to debates about history. In some hands, it freezes rights to narrow conceptions that address specific problems familiar to those responsible for the Bill of Rights when ratified in 1791.

Others, however, recognize that the quest for a “more perfect union” involves understanding root concepts and applying them to novel modern fact patterns. That is what Justice Kennedy attempted in Obergefell v. Hodges,[3] the same-sex marriage opinion in which Alito’s dissent argued, as in the Dobbs draft, that the issue belongs to the individual states and not to constitutional argument.[4]

In evaluating a right to same-sex marriage, Kennedy noted that “Loving [v. Virginia[5]] did not ask about a ‘right to interracial marriage.’”[6] Certainly, interracial marriage was neither “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” nor “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Instead of looking for historical validation, Kennedy wrote that Loving and other marriage cases “inquired about the right to marry in its comprehensive sense, asking if there was a sufficient justification for excluding the relevant class from the right.”[7]

The determination of whether “liberty’ is limited to conceptions based on experience in 1791 or even 1868, when states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, or more expansively read to apply analogous concepts to modern questions provides the basis for the real debate. The Framers anticipated that some might deny the existence of unenumerated rights and provided explicit constitutional text to rebut the argument: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”[8] Doing so, however, provided no interpretative guide.

To James Madison, the Ninth Amendment’s simple sentence embodied "the great residuum" of rights that people possessed.[9] He told the First Congress in defense of his draft bill of rights that Americans need not fear that an omission means denial. He pointed to the British common law we inherited, where advocates of individual liberties as barriers to government overreach were able to secure a wide range of rights in Britain without written protections.[10] In doing so, Madison sought to prevent those interpreting the Constitution’s rights regime from drawing an adverse inference from absence in the text.

It is also important to keep in mind another aid courts have used in construing the Constitution that applies with equal force to unenumerated rights. As Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote, those who framed the Constitution “were born and brought up in the atmosphere of the common law, and thought and spoke in its vocabulary.”[11] They valued the interpretative craft that Lord Edward Coke brought to Magna Carta, transforming it from exemptions from royal control that largely benefited the landed class into a celebrated bulwark of liberty that had a special appeal and application to the grievances of colonial America.[12]

That type of contextual interpretation bound to experience was endorsed by Madison. During a congressional debate about constitutional limitations relating to the Jay Treaty, Madison expressed astonishment that members would ask him to explain the Constitutional Convention’s take on the issue before the House. He explained that, based on agreements to disagree and his own doubts about his ability to reconstruct his thinking during the Convention, the views of the framers “could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution.”[13]

If we are left to our own wisdom in attempting to discern how timeless principles apply to modern dilemmas, then we confront a very human problem of reading an 18^th century document and the history behind it with 21^st century eyes and values. Thus, those who seek to empower parents with more power to object to school curriculum insist on an unenumerated right discovered in Meyer v. Nebraska,[14] and Pierce v. Soc’y of the Sisters,[15] holding that parents have a right to direct the education of their children. The decisions placed the “liberty” at issue in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause[16] and read liberty broadly. Meyer described liberty to embrace more than “merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”[17] State courts had reached similar conclusions on parental rights, not based on their state constitutions, but on their readings of the common law.[18]

Interestingly, Meyer’s and Pierce’s use of family to establish a parental educational right provided building blocks that established the fundamental nature of the right to marry, even though nothing in the Constitution addresses marriage[19] or education. Still, the common law did provide a basis for marriage.[20] It is the use of a common-law methodology that imposes the requirement of a search warrant to prevent unlawful entry into a home as well as the use of remote modern eavesdropping devices that involve no physical entry.

Similarly, the tools we use to understand the application of unenumerated rights must be read to embrace the underlying concept of liberty in light of modern antidiscrimination principles, the organic nature of the common law, and their place in understanding our Constitution. While such an approach is not as unbounded as it might seem, it is also not outcome-determinative. Inevitably, we depend on the wisdom of those we entrust with interpreting our rights to learn from the lessons of the past and remain mindful of the impact that can accompany radical reinterpretation, whether it leads to novel decisions or retrenchment.

In the end, Judge Learned Hand’s description of “The Spirit of Liberty” may best explain the scope of our liberties. Stating that he was unable to define the spirit of liberty, he still supposed that it embodies the idea of uncertainty being “not too sure that it is right;” “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women;” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”[21] Most importantly:

    Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no     court to save it.[22]

 

[1] 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

[2] Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997). Interestingly, earlier in Glucksberg, the Court describes the test in all due process cases as being an examination of “our Nation's history, legal traditions, and practices.” Id. at 710. Many subsequent formulations, like the Dobbs draft, leave out “practices.”

[3] 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

[4] Id. at 736 (Alito, J., dissenting).

[5] 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

[6] Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 671.

[7] Id.

[8] U.S. Const. amend. ix.

[9] James Madison, Speech Introducing Bill of Rights (June 8, 1789), available at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_ rightss11.html (linking unenumerated rights to a constitutional framework that created a federal government of limited powers).

[10] 1 Annals of Cong. 454 (Jun. 8, 1789).

[11] Ex parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87, 109 (1925).

[12] See Klopfer v. North Carolina, 386 U.S. 213, 225 (1967).

[13] 5 Annals of Cong. 775-76 (Apr. 6, 1796).

[14] 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

[15] 268 U.S. 510 (1925).

[16] There is a substantial argument that a better source of implied liberties is the Privileges and Immunities Clause, read in conjunction with the Ninth Amendment, but that debate, which has not won a majority on the Supreme Court, is beyond the scope of this post.

[17] Meyer, 262 U.S. at 399.

[18] See, e.g., Sch. Bd. Dist. No. 18, Garvin County v. Thompson, 103 P. 578, 579, 582 (Okla. 1909) (holding that a school may not expel students, who at the direction of their parents, refused to participate in singing lessons, and holding that “[a]t common law the principal duties of parents to their legitimate children consisted in their maintenance, their protection, and their education,” and that the parent’s right “is superior to that of the school officers and the teachers.”).

[19] See Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 667.

[20] See Meister v. Moore, 96 U.S. 76, 81, 24 L. Ed. 826 (1877).

[21] Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty” (1944).

[22] Id.

Denying Unenumerated Rights

The leaked draft SCOTUS opinion overturning Roe v. Wade[1] shares a hostility to unenumerated rights similar in kind to what some Senators expressed during the confirmation hearing of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Critics often say that unenumerated rights lack legitimacy because they have no specific textual anchors. Instead, the criticism goes, they reflect nothing more than a judge’s political views treated as constitutional gloss – except, of course, when the critic likes the result or cannot deny the right without seeming foolish or racist.

To be sure, Justice Alito’s Dobbs draft did not deny that implied rights exist. After noting that abortion is not in the Constitution, a factual statement that can also be said of separation of powers, Alito limited what he dubbed “implied rights” to those “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,”[2] a judge-made formulation that does not by itself cabin the interpretative exercise and leads to debates about history. In some hands, it freezes rights to narrow conceptions that address specific problems familiar to those responsible for the Bill of Rights when ratified in 1791.

Others, however, recognize that the quest for a “more perfect union” involves understanding root concepts and applying them to novel modern fact patterns. That is what Justice Kennedy attempted in Obergefell v. Hodges,[3] the same-sex marriage opinion in which Alito’s dissent argued, as in the Dobbs draft, that the issue belongs to the individual states and not to constitutional argument.[4]

In evaluating a right to same-sex marriage, Kennedy noted that “Loving [v. Virginia[5]] did not ask about a ‘right to interracial marriage.’”[6] Certainly, interracial marriage was neither “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” nor “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Instead of looking for historical validation, Kennedy wrote that Loving and other marriage cases “inquired about the right to marry in its comprehensive sense, asking if there was a sufficient justification for excluding the relevant class from the right.”[7]

The determination of whether “liberty’ is limited to conceptions based on experience in 1791 or even 1868, when states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, or more expansively read to apply analogous concepts to modern questions provides the basis for the real debate. The Framers anticipated that some might deny the existence of unenumerated rights and provided explicit constitutional text to rebut the argument: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”[8] Doing so, however, provided no interpretative guide.

To James Madison, the Ninth Amendment’s simple sentence embodied "the great residuum" of rights that people possessed.[9] He told the First Congress in defense of his draft bill of rights that Americans need not fear that an omission means denial. He pointed to the British common law we inherited, where advocates of individual liberties as barriers to government overreach were able to secure a wide range of rights in Britain without written protections.[10] In doing so, Madison sought to prevent those interpreting the Constitution’s rights regime from drawing an adverse inference from absence in the text.

It is also important to keep in mind another aid courts have used in construing the Constitution that applies with equal force to unenumerated rights. As Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote, those who framed the Constitution “were born and brought up in the atmosphere of the common law, and thought and spoke in its vocabulary.”[11] They valued the interpretative craft that Lord Edward Coke brought to Magna Carta, transforming it from exemptions from royal control that largely benefited the landed class into a celebrated bulwark of liberty that had a special appeal and application to the grievances of colonial America.[12]

That type of contextual interpretation bound to experience was endorsed by Madison. During a congressional debate about constitutional limitations relating to the Jay Treaty, Madison expressed astonishment that members would ask him to explain the Constitutional Convention’s take on the issue before the House. He explained that, based on agreements to disagree and his own doubts about his ability to reconstruct his thinking during the Convention, the views of the framers “could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution.”[13]

If we are left to our own wisdom in attempting to discern how timeless principles apply to modern dilemmas, then we confront a very human problem of reading an 18^th century document and the history behind it with 21^st century eyes and values. Thus, those who seek to empower parents with more power to object to school curriculum insist on an unenumerated right discovered in Meyer v. Nebraska,[14] and Pierce v. Soc’y of the Sisters,[15] holding that parents have a right to direct the education of their children. The decisions placed the “liberty” at issue in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause[16] and read liberty broadly. Meyer described liberty to embrace more than “merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”[17] State courts had reached similar conclusions on parental rights, not based on their state constitutions, but on their readings of the common law.[18]

Interestingly, Meyer’s and Pierce’s use of family to establish a parental educational right provided building blocks that established the fundamental nature of the right to marry, even though nothing in the Constitution addresses marriage[19] or education. Still, the common law did provide a basis for marriage.[20] It is the use of a common-law methodology that imposes the requirement of a search warrant to prevent unlawful entry into a home as well as the use of remote modern eavesdropping devices that involve no physical entry.

Similarly, the tools we use to understand the application of unenumerated rights must be read to embrace the underlying concept of liberty in light of modern antidiscrimination principles, the organic nature of the common law, and their place in understanding our Constitution. While such an approach is not as unbounded as it might seem, it is also not outcome-determinative. Inevitably, we depend on the wisdom of those we entrust with interpreting our rights to learn from the lessons of the past and remain mindful of the impact that can accompany radical reinterpretation, whether it leads to novel decisions or retrenchment.

In the end, Judge Learned Hand’s description of “The Spirit of Liberty” may best explain the scope of our liberties. Stating that he was unable to define the spirit of liberty, he still supposed that it embodies the idea of uncertainty being “not too sure that it is right;” “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women;” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”[21] Most importantly:

    Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no     court to save it.[22]

 

[1] 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

[2] Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997). Interestingly, earlier in Glucksberg, the Court describes the test in all due process cases as being an examination of “our Nation's history, legal traditions, and practices.” Id. at 710. Many subsequent formulations, like the Dobbs draft, leave out “practices.”

[3] 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

[4] Id. at 736 (Alito, J., dissenting).

[5] 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

[6] Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 671.

[7] Id.

[8] U.S. Const. amend. ix.

[9] James Madison, Speech Introducing Bill of Rights (June 8, 1789), available at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_ rightss11.html (linking unenumerated rights to a constitutional framework that created a federal government of limited powers).

[10] 1 Annals of Cong. 454 (Jun. 8, 1789).

[11] Ex parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87, 109 (1925).

[12] See Klopfer v. North Carolina, 386 U.S. 213, 225 (1967).

[13] 5 Annals of Cong. 775-76 (Apr. 6, 1796).

[14] 262 U.S. 390 (1923).

[15] 268 U.S. 510 (1925).

[16] There is a substantial argument that a better source of implied liberties is the Privileges and Immunities Clause, read in conjunction with the Ninth Amendment, but that debate, which has not won a majority on the Supreme Court, is beyond the scope of this post.

[17] Meyer, 262 U.S. at 399.

[18] See, e.g., Sch. Bd. Dist. No. 18, Garvin County v. Thompson, 103 P. 578, 579, 582 (Okla. 1909) (holding that a school may not expel students, who at the direction of their parents, refused to participate in singing lessons, and holding that “[a]t common law the principal duties of parents to their legitimate children consisted in their maintenance, their protection, and their education,” and that the parent’s right “is superior to that of the school officers and the teachers.”).

[19] See Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 667.

[20] See Meister v. Moore, 96 U.S. 76, 81, 24 L. Ed. 826 (1877).

[21] Learned Hand, “The Spirit of Liberty” (1944).

[22] Id.

Putting the Audience First: A Perspective on Legal Writing

Thursday’s Rhaw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

Putting the Audience First:  A Perspective on Legal Writing

A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a short dinner talk about legal writing to a group of federal district court staff attorneys and judges.  The talk was entitled “Audience-First Legal Writing.”  This month’s post is based on that talk.

Legal writing is always and almost exclusively at its best when it is audience-centered. That is, the best legal writers know that they can be most effective when their documents meet the audience’s needs.  Accordingly, the best legal writers write legal documents not for themselves but for the audience.  And the consequence of that commitment to audience is the knowledge that every rhetorical move and every writing choice contributes to the audience’s view on whether the writing is “good.”   

What an audience thinks is “good” legal writing changes with the purpose of and context for the document.  Much of the time, a writer can’t know with certainty what an audience will deem “good.”   Of course, the better the writer knows the specific audience, the more likely the writer can be successfully audience-centered.  But, even without this knowledge, legal writers can anticipate some common needs that audiences might have of a document.  Is the document understandable?  Accurate? A quick read?  Logically sound? Interesting?  Well organized?  Engaging?  Convincing?  In other words, writers are not without resources when it comes to anticipating and writing for audiences in ways that satisfy their needs.  But, without prioritizing an audience-centered view of writing, none of those resources can be brought to bear in a writing project.

As such, I’ll suggest that the legal writer’s prime directive is this: 

In a deliberate way and in every writing choice, put the audience first.

“Audience-First” Is a Perspective on How to Write

I notice that legal writing instruction—particularly in the context of continuing legal education—is often directed to the tactics that one can use to make their legal writing better. For example, “prefer active voice,” is a tactic of good legal writing.   Nothing is wrong with learning good legal writing tactics.  But those tactics aren’t all that useful without a perspective on or a strategy for deploying them.   

An audience-first approach to legal writing is that perspective or strategy.  An audience-first orientation toward the writing project can guide how one chooses which tactics to use to write a document.  In other words, having an audience-first approach to writing is way of being and seeing as a writer that will lead to effective writing choices.

Actual, Imagined, and Implied Audiences

The first goal of an audience-first legal writer is first understand the audiences to which one writes.  To start, a writer wants to get to know the actual audience of a document as well as one possibly can.  For example, if a writer knows the particular preferences or desires of the actual audience, that knowledge can play a big role in meeting those needs.  

But it’s tough to always know (and know well) the actual audience of a legal document.  In fact, I’d argue, that there is no one, “actual” audience for a legal document; audiences in legal writing are typically multiple.  For example, an appellate brief might find audiences in clients, opposing counsel, supervisors, clerks, judges, the press, and a host of legally interested internet surfers.  Moreover, even within an actual audience, like judicial clerks, for example, a writer may be unable to know the specific expectations, preferences, and needs of those readers. 

But lacking information about the actual audience does not leave a legal writer without options.  This is because a writer’s audience is not just the audience the writer can identify with specificity, but it is also the audience that the writer can imagine, based upon their educated guesses about that  audience.  Key to the imagined audience is that it is a composite audience, an idealized example of the people who will be reading the document.  Unlike the actual audience, the imagined audience represents a group of anticipated readers in terms of their collective goals and characteristics.  So, an audience-first approach means to imagining this idealized example and then writing for it.

Finally, an audience-first approach means being attentive to the audience that is implied in a document. That is to say, audiences are not only actual or imagined, but they are also the ones that the document itself brings into being. Think of it this way:  Actual and imagined audiences exist even if a text didn’t.  Implied audiences exist only because the text does.   

Unpacking the Implied Audience: Everything You Need to Plan the Most Epic Prom Ever

 An implied audience is one that is constructed by the document itself and can be inferred from analyzing that document. Writers imply an audience in a document based on how they decide to organize the text and describe the concepts within it.  In other words, when writers make choices about the writing, one can see in the document who the writer wants the audience to be. 

The idea of the implied audience can be seen as a perspective on persuasion that gives a legal writer tremendous power over a reader’s reception of the document.  Writing a document to not only address but also imply a particular audience results in content that can both create needs in the audience and then satisfy them.  In other words, implying an audience in a text can motivate a reader to become an audience with a need (perhaps one that the reader didn’t even know they had) that the document can satisfy.

I’ll use a nonlegal example of how implied audience works in a text to help simplify the analysis.

In March, Seventeen magazine published this headline on the front page of its website: “Everything You Need to Plan the Most Epic Prom Ever.”

There’s a good bit of implied audience at work in this sentence. 

First, the sentence implies an audience that is—or should be—interested in having a great prom experience.  This sentence not only attracts the attention of an audience already looking for information about a great prom, the sentence also constructs a prom-interested audience; it tells readers to be an audience with an interest in prom. In other words, the words of the sentence create an audience with certain needs; in fact, the sentence is not even subtle about this—it specifically says that “you” have a “need”!

Second, the sentence tells the audience that the website has what the audience needs; it has, as the title says, “everything.”  Keep reading, implied audience, to meet your (constructed-in-the-text) need for everything! 

Third, the title implies an audience who is willing to work at accomplishing this epic prom.  In other words, the text implies an active audience—one who will “plan” everything necessary to ensure this experience is fantastic.  By creating for the audience a need for action steps, the text sets up a particular relationship with that audience—one where the audience prepares to do something with the information they’ve learned.

Finally, the title artfully uses the word “epic.”  The word “epic” implies an audience of a certain generation—one that would use the word “epic”—and with certain expectations—very high ones.  The tone of the sentence might even suggest that the implied audience has a fear of missing out on all of prom’s “epic” possibilities.  This fear might motivate action--I, too, want the most epic prom ever—what do I need to do? At the very least, the sentence suggests, look at the website (and perhaps all of the advertisements?) for everything you need!

So, what should a legal writer, taking an audience-first approach, conclude about the implied audience from this analysis of Seventeen magazine’s website headline?  This sentence invites into being an audience that is probably in high school, is interested in prom, is expecting prom to be an amazing experience, is willing to plan, and is looking for exhaustive information on what to do.  This audience, and all its characteristics, is implied in the sentence; the sentence creates an audience who has needs, invites the reader to be in that audience, and implicitly promises that those needs will be met in the text that follows. 

As legal writers, we might ask ourselves—if one sentence can do that much work implying an audience and creating and satisfying its needs, what could we accomplish with all the sentences of a legal document?

A Recap and Some Questions

So, as a reminder, this post suggests that the best way to approach legal writing is to take an audience-first approach.  First, write to the audiences you know as well as the audiences you can imagine. You can do this by asking a few questions at the beginning of your writing process, the answers to which will guide your writing choices:

• What are the characteristics of the actual audience that will be reading your document? What will they need?
• Equally important, who is your imagined audience? What will the idealized reader need from the document?

Second, write with a conscious awareness of the audiences that your documents imply. Implying an audience gives you the power to be more persuasive by motivating readers to become audiences with needs you can satisfy through your writing choices.  To become more aware of the implied audience in your writing, ask

• What needs do you want the audience to have that can be met by the document?

Next Month:  Connecting Writing Tactics to the Audience-First Legal Writing Strategy

An audience-first perspective on legal writing can give a legal writer a useful strategy for writing effective documents that can appeal to and meet the needs of audiences.  The next step is to connect the audience-first strategy to the writing tools that writers already have in their tool boxes.  These tools are the tactics that the writer will use to satisfy the needs of the audience.  In next month’s post, I’ll connect some writing tactics to the audience-first approach.

Kirsten Davis teaches at Stetson University College of Law and in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She is the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication. The Institute’s mission is to study legal communication issues and provide programming and training that improves legal communication skills. Among other things she’s up to right now, she’s currently serving on the Florida Bar Association’s Special Committee on Professionalism. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not intended to be legal advice. You can reach Dr. Davis at [email protected].

Minor edits made by the author on 8/1/22.

The “It-Cleft” Sentence: Grammar Choice, Persuasive Effect

Thursday’s Raw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

The “It-Cleft” Sentence:  Grammar Choice, Persuasive Effect

The Problem with “It Is”

Modern legal writing doctrine says this:  Almost never start a sentence with “it is.”  This advice has a good reason: “It is” at the beginning of the sentence often signals a throat-clearing phrase, a phrase that offers little information to readers and delays them in getting to the point of the sentence.  Over at his blog, Legible, Wayne Schiess describes a throat-clearing phrase as a “flabby sentence opener” that makes writing weak and less concise:  He gives two examples of throat-clearing phrases that start with “it is”: “It is clear that,” and “It is important to point out that.”  Both are empty openers.

What’s the problem with “it is” in the context of throat-clearing?  First, “it” is a “dummy” pronoun—a pronoun that points to no particular noun.  And “is” is a being verb that evokes little, if any, imagery or action.   So, more or less, “it is,” in the context of a throat-clearing sentence opener, says “nothing exists.”   Good job, legal writer.  What a great way to start a sentence for a busy legal reader who craves vivid detail, precision, and concision.   

Because of the characteristics of “it is” in the sentence-starting context, plenty of excellent legal writing instruction directs writers to find these phlegmy phrases and clear them from the informative writing the reader cares about.  Typically, I tell my students to use the “find” tool in their word processors to search for “it is,” and when the phrase appears at the beginning of a sentence, revise the sentence to get rid of the extra words.  But am I right?

Enter the “It-Cleft” Sentence

Not quite. The “it-cleft” sentence, which starts with “it is” or “it was,” is an exception to the rule.  Unlike throat-clearing, an it-cleft sentence can be used to enhance the persuasive effect of legal writing.  Because an it-cleft gives a writer another way to place emphasis on the most important idea in a sentence, it can be a useful persuasive writing tool.  

The “it-cleft” sentence is not a new idea.  Composition experts and linguists know and write about “cleft” sentences.  A cleft sentence is easily identified because the sentence’s clauses are “split” and then re-ordered in an unusual way. That is, the usual is upended to create a new point of emphasis. Typically, that point of emphasis is at the beginning of the sentence.  After a sentence is cleft, the sentence will start with “it” and followed by a being verb (i.e., is, are, was, were).  (Side note:  There are other options for starting a cleft sentence including “what” and “all.”)

It-Cleft Examples:  Before and After

Here are two examples, adapted from Supreme Court opinions:

Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006).

• Non-cleft: The First Amendment secures public employees’ rights to speak as citizens addressing matters of public concern.
• It-cleft (emphasizing citizens speaking): It is the right as citizens to speak on matters of public concern that the First Amendment secures for public employees.

Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018).

• Non-cleft: The hostility surfaced at the Commission’s formal, public hearings.
• It-cleft (emphasizing location): It was at the Commission’s formal, public hearings that the hostility surfaced.

The examples show that the “it-cleft” gives writers an option for changing the point of emphasis in a sentence. In the first example, the emphasis is on the First Amendment law and what it says.  But in the cleft sentence, the emphasis changes to people—speaking citizens and public employees.   By moving the “speaking citizen” to the beginning of the sentence and then “pointing” at that language with “it is,” the reader’s attention is drawn away from a general statement of First Amendment law to a specific assertion about public employee citizen rights.  Although there’s no real difference between the content of the two sentences, the take-away of the sentence noticeably changes.

The mechanics and effect in the second example are similar.  In the non-cleft sentence, the emphasis is on the action--“hostility.”  But in the cleft sentence, the emphasis is on the location of the hostility—the “hearings.”   We might imagine that Justice Kennedy, who wrote the Masterpiece Cakeshop opinion, could have profitably included the cleft sentence to emphasize his point.  In Masterpiece Cakeshop, Justice Kennedy wrote that a state civil rights commission had violated the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment by being openly hostile to the religion of a party before it. He said that hostile comments caused the Court to “doubt on the fairness and impartiality” of the commission’s adjudicative hearings.  Unlike in other cases where government representatives had made discriminatory remarks, the commissioners’ comments in Masterpiece were made in the adjudicative hearings that were both public and on the record.

Kennedy might have used the it-cleft technique to further emphasize that the location of the hostility—at the public, on-the-record, adjudicative hearings—mattered to his reasoning.  A cleft sentence would bring more attention to the location’s importance.

Three Suggestions for Using It-Cleft in Persuasive Writing

Here are three suggestions for using it-cleft sentences.

• Use an it-cleft to double-down on an important contrast. In the Masterpiece Cakeshop example, we might imagine a paragraph that used the it-cleft sentence in a sentence like this:

The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of the party showed impermissible hostility toward the party’s sincere religious beliefs. That hostility did not just occur in the private comments of the Commissioners.  Instead, it was at the Commission’s formal, public hearings that the hostility surfaced.

In this example, the it-cleft adds extra emphasis to the contrast between the ideas in the last two sentences.  The writer first tells the reader where the comments did not occur; then, for emphasis, the writer focuses the reader on the location of the comments.  While the writer could have written, “Instead, the hostility surfaced at the Commission’s formal public meetings,”  the writer took advantage of the it-cleft to add extra emphasis to the contrast.

• If you can, simplify and shorten an it-cleft. An it-cleft is already a complex grammatical construction, so simplifying and shortening an it-cleft sentence can make the sentence more accessible. Take for example, the Garcetti sentence: It is the right as citizens to speak on matters of public concern that the First Amendment secures for public employees. The sentence effectively emphasizes the right to speak, but the sentence is a little clunky.  How about this?

It is the right as citizens to speak on matters of public concern that the First Amendment secures.

The sentence is not a great deal shorter than the original, but I like it better.  Admittedly, the language about the “public employees” is gone from the sentence.  But what if the context, rather than the sentence itself, supplied the necessary meaning?  Maybe that context would look something like this:

Public employees are more than government workers; they are citizens who are concerned with the issues facing their communities. It is their right as citizens to speak on matters of public concern that the First Amendment secures.

• Like other persuasive writing devices, use it-cleft sentences be used sparingly. It is the unique sentence construction that produces the persuasive effect.  (See what I did there? 😊) But the sentence can’t benefit from its novelty if the construction is over-used.

Lead with Your Strength

We all know that, with some exceptions,[1] we should lead with our strongest argument. But, it’s not enough to lead with our strongest argument—we should lead with our strongest positive argument. By that, I mean the strongest argument for why we should win, not our strongest argument for why the other side should lose. This can be particularly difficult to do when we represent the appellee because the appellant has set out their arguments and our first instinct might be to show why their arguments are wrong. But that’s not leading with our strength, it’s an attempt to show our opponent’s weakness.

Take this example from the appellees' brief in Welling v. Weinfield.[2] In Welling, the Supreme Court of Ohio was asked to recognize the tort of false-light invasion of privacy.[3] After first arguing a procedural issue, that the case had been improvidently granted,[4] the appellees began the substantive argument like this:

As noted by the Wellings in their opening brief to this Court, a majority of the jurisdictions in the United States have adopted the false-light invasion of privacy cause of action. Brief of Appellants at 8. In The Denver Publishing Co. v. Bueno (Colo. 2002), 54 P.3d 893, the Colorado Supreme Court noted that 30 states had adopted the false-light invasion of privacy theory as part of their tort law. Despite that, the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the tort because it overlaps defamation to such a large degree and because its adoption might have a chilling effect on First Amendment freedoms. This Court should do the same.[5]

See how the appellees referred to and agreed with the appellant’s brief (giving appellant’s argument credibility) and then highlighted the strengths of the appellant’s argument:

• a majority of jurisdictions have adopted the claim;
• the Colorado Supreme Court noted that thirty states had adopted it.

It’s not until the next to last sentence of that opening paragraphing that we learn of the appellees' positive arguments: the tort overlaps with defamation and recognizing the claim could chill free speech.[6]

Here is how I might re-write the opening paragraph to lead with why the appellees should win:

This Court should reject the invitation to expand Ohio law. Defamation and false-light invasion of privacy claims largely overlap. And recognizing a false-light invasion of privacy claim might chill speech protected by the First Amendment. Instead, the Court should follow the reasoning of the Colorado Supreme Court. That court acknowledged the states that had recognized the claim but refused to do so because of the overlap with defamation and the possible chilling effect on free speech. The Denver Publishing Co. v. Bueno, 54 P.3d 893 (2002).

How would you re-write the opening paragraph to lead with the appellees' positive argument?

[1] An example of when this rule wouldn’t apply is when there is a procedural argument that logic dictates be addressed first.

[2] 866 N.E.2d 1035 (Ohio 2007).

[3] Id. at 1053.

[4] Robert E. WELLING, et al., Appellants, v. Lauri WEINFELD, Appellee., 2006 WL 1860670 (Ohio), 16.

[5] Id. at 17.

[6] Id.

The Value in "Low-Value" Speech

Last week, another contributor to this blog, Adam Lamparello, wrote a purposefully provocative piece, arguing that low-value speech that causes emotional distress should be without First Amendment protection. By prearrangement, this post responds to it.

As I thought about my response, I recalled a television appearance I made the day before the argument in Forsyth Cnty. v. Nationalist Movement.[1] I was asked to discuss the issues in the case, as was the attorney who would argue the case for the Nationalist Movement, the white supremacist group he had founded. He predictably used the platform to spout his “philosophy,” but did little to explain his planned argument.[2]

I vividly recall that when I asked to respond to his offensive statements, I explained that even a person as despicable as he was fell within the First Amendment's protection, though not based on any belief that the views he expressed had inherent value. In supporting free speech, I was not supporting his detestable views; I was supporting the Bill of Rights. Our obligation was to use our own free-speech rights to denounce him and his views, rather than silence them. In this way, the First Amendment serves as a safety valve. Doing so prevents those opinions from existing only underground, lulling us into complacency only to emerge more virulently and unexpectedly. It also allows us to employ counter-speech to organize against it. The facts that gave rise to Forsyth Cnty. supply a useful example.

The county sits 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. In 1912, more than 1,000 Black residents of the county were driven from it after one was lynched on accusations of rape and murder of a white woman. By 1987, the county remained 99 percent white. It was in that year that civil rights activist Hosea Williams led a “March Against Fear and Intimidation” by 90 demonstrators. They were met by 400 counterdemonstrators from the KKK and the local affiliate of the Nationalist Movement and greeted with thrown rocks, bottles, and racial slurs that quickly brought the march to an end. Undeterred, Williams returned the following weekend. This time, he brought 20,000 fellow marchers, along with civil rights leaders, Senators, presidential candidates, and an Assistant United States Attorney General. It was the “largest civil rights demonstration in the South since the 1960s.”[3] The march was protected by “3,000 state and local police and National Guardsmen,” rather than the small local police force that had been overwhelmed at the first march. The larger law enforcement contingent largely checked the 1,000 counterdemonstrators.[4]

The nub, however, was that police protection produced a bill of $670,000, though the county only paid a small part of it. The county then enacted an ordinance that imposed a variable fee on future marchers that would be set in the county’s discretion each time. A later ordinance capped the fee at $1,000 per day.[5]

In January 1989, the Nationalist Movement planned their own demonstration to voice opposition to the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and Forsyth County imposed a $100 permit fee to cover the county administrator’s time in issuing the permit, but not for potential police protection. In the challenge to that fee, the Supreme Court, 5-4, held that the fee was an unconstitutional content-based burden on free speech with the fee set by the officials’ estimate of “the public’s reaction to the speech.”[6]

Proponents of treating certain speech as low-value or subject to regulation because of its emotional impact often assume that such regulations will protect the people and causes they like and only hurt speech that they condemn. History teaches otherwise. All who would change the status quo create discomfort and perhaps even cause emotional distress to those aligned with entrenched powers. Last week, in a New York Times op-ed in support of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote: “This is how change begins — by destabilizing comfortable narratives, with the inclusion of those who have not been seen.”[7] In fact, free speech has its most urgent application when the ideas expressed do not have majority approval.

One need only look at the accusations made in many parts of the country that anything that smacks of racial justice or history constitutes critical race theory and must be suppressed to prevent white schoolchildren from feeling inferior. To that end, Tennessee enacted a law in June that prohibits lesson plans that cause a student to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.”[8] The blatantly unconstitutional law was not enacted to protect minority students from emotional distress, but to protect the white majority from confronting racism. It, like any carve-out of an exception for low-value, emotionally distressing speech, simply gives those in power the authority to suppress dissent -- and, too often, progress.

[1] 505 U.S. 123 (1992).

[2] It turned out that his philosophy was his argument. Before the Supreme Court, he spoke about “the shiny sword of reason that ousts tyranny” and announced that he hoped his tombstone would read: “The road not taken, but not the speech not given.” Chief Justice Rehnquist responded, “How about the argument not made?” Tony Mauro, “Avowed Racist Flies Solo in Speech Case,” Legal Times, Apr. 13, 1992.

[3] Forsyth Cnty., 505 U.S. at 125-26.

[4] Id. at 126.

[5] Id. at 126-27.

[6] Id. at 134.

[7] Sherrilyn A. Ifill, “Who’s Afraid of Ketanji Brown Jackson?,” N.Y. Times (Mar. 2, 2022), available at  https://nyti.ms/3tAOkaC.

[8] Tenn. Code § 49-6-1019(a)(6).

Preempting Appellate Issues in Palin v. New York Times

    In the space of two days last week, Sarah Palin lost her libel suit against the New York Times twice. Palin’s claim centered on a New York Times editorial in 2017 that linked Palin’s political rhetoric to the mass shooting that nearly cost representative Gabby Giffords her life. While the jury was deliberating on Monday, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a senior judge in the Southern District of New York and former prosecutor who has written extensively on the flaws in America’s justice system, announced that he planned to dismiss the suit no matter what verdict the jury might return. Though Rakoff allowed the jury to continue deliberating, he announced his finding that Palin had not met the high standard to show “actual malice” by the newspaper, a requirement for public figures raising libel claims established in 1964’s New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. One day later, the jury agreed, rendering a verdict in favor of the Times that is likely to be appealed, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court.

    Rakoff’s unusual step came in response to the Times’s motion for a directed verdict, which claimed that reasonable jurors could only conclude that Palin had failed to meet her evidentiary burden to show actual malice on the Times’s part. Such a directed verdict would be effective without any additional word from the jury. Such verdicts typically occur either before the jury begins deliberations or after they have returned a contrary verdict. In the Palin case, Rakoff’s extremely unusual ruling came while the jury was still deliberating. Rakoff justified that decision on the grounds that Palin was likely to appeal, so his ruling might avoid the need for a retrial. Because appellate courts are generally more deferential to jury verdicts, Rakoff’s apparent hope was that his ruling would allow the appellate court to consider the trial process concluded, then decide the appeal solely the legal issue of actual malice. That would prevent the appellate court from remanding for a new trial, which would render the proceedings to date an enormous waste of resources for all parties involved.

    It is no surprise that Judge Rakoff hopes to control the appellate process from this case given its long history in his courtroom. Judge Rakoff initially dismissed Palin’s lawsuit nearly five years earlier, only to have an appellate court reverse his decision and reinstate the case. He may have hoped to avoid the same fate, and thus permitted the jury to reach a verdict even though he was convinced that the suit had no legal merit. But his ruling may have affected jury deliberations nonetheless, undermining the very purpose behind it. After the jury reached its verdict, several jurors informed Judge Rakoff’s clerk that they had seen notifications about the Judge’s ruling on their phones. Though the jurors insisted that those notifications played no role in their decisions, Palin’s legal team is almost certain to seize upon that news in seeking a new trial during the appellate process. Rakoff’s decision thus seems likely to lead to complications on appeal at a minimum, and perhaps even the need for the very resource-intensive retrial he hoped to avoid.

    The case is a microcosm of the desire trial judges often harbor to control the outcome of their cases all the way through the appellate process. Trial judges may genuinely aim to enforce the rule of law without an eye towards the repercussions. But trial judges are also human actors within a legal system. And nobody, judge or not, enjoys hearing from their superiors that they have made a mistake and may need to repeat months or even years of work to correct it.

    Those kinds of cognitive biases are ever present, ever for trained and experienced judges. Those biases are difficult to control, though gains can be made by engaging more deliberative processes and reducing decision making to checklist-style thinking to reduce the impact of these biases. Blind efforts to buttress a given decision against overrule and remand, however, are unlikely to be successful. As the Palin case illustrates, they may even be counter-productive for the well-intentioned judge.

    Judge Rakoff’s judicial legacy is hardly in question. But even he may have succumb to the simple human desire to see an initial decision upheld without question or doubt. And in doing so, he may have done his own decision a disservice, making it far more likely that it will be reversed in the future. That kind of trial judge overreach should be avoided as much as possible.

[Sic] It, Fix It, or Ignore It? The Rhetorical Implications of Spotlighting Another Writer’s Error

Thursday’s Rhaw Bar: A Little Bite of All Things Rhetoric and Law—exploring ideas, theories, strategies, techniques, and critiques at the intersection of rhetoric and legal communication.

[Sic] It, Fix It, or Ignore It?  The Rhetorical Implications of Spotlighting Another Writer’s Error

I’m teaching The First Amendment this semester, which means I’m reading very closely a lot of United States Supreme Court opinions on freedom of expression. (An aside:  One of my favorite opinions for a close read of persuasive writing is Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion in Snyder v. Phelps; although I largely disagree with him on his reasoning and conclusions in that opinion, the opinion is a great example of using details and evoking emotion in support of reasoning.)

I was closely reading the majority opinion in RAV v. City of St. Paul, written by Justice Scalia, when I noticed this sentence, in which the Justice describes Respondent City of St. Paul’s argument about why its Bias Motivated Crime Ordinance did not violate the First Amendment (Scalia, writing for the majority, found that it did):

According to St. Paul, the ordinance is intended, “not to impact on [sic] the right of free expression of the accused,” but rather to “protect against the victimization of a person or persons who are particularly vulnerable because of their membership in a group that historically has been discriminated against.”

Appellate lawyers know the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation or The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation rules for using [sic].  If there is a mistake in a quotation, “such as spelling, typographical, or grammatical errors,” says the ALWD Guide, authors may use [sic] to indicate that the error is not their own but is instead part of the original quotation.  Alternatively, authors may fix the error themselves, using brackets to correct the original author’s mistake. (For more, consult ALWD Guide Rule 39.6, Indicating Mistakes in the Original and The Bluebook Rule 5.2, Alterations and Quotations Within Quotations.)

Knowing these rules, I must confess that I was distracted by the [sic] in Justice Scalia’s sentence rather than confident that I understood his meaning.  What exactly was Justice Scalia’s concern that [sic] was signaling?  Was he suggesting that “on” should have been omitted? Or was he saying that the right word to use here was “upon”? Or was he suggesting something else altogether?  And, I wondered, how did the misuse of “on” make a difference to his opinion?  Or to St. Paul’s argument?  Or to anything for that matter?  Was Justice Scalia drawing my attention to the error just for the sake of showing that St. Paul had made an error? And, if so, why would Justice Scalia do that? 

Scalia’s choice to use [sic] here rather than pursue some other alternative made me wonder:  Even if a legal writer may draw attention to another writer’s error by using [sic] rather than correcting the mistake, should the legal writer do so?  Answering that question requires thinking about not only about how to accurately signal a mistake in a quotation, but also about how [sic] influences the persuasiveness of the document and the reader’s perception of the writer.

The first thing to think about when considering whether to use [sic] is that [sic] has the potential to create unnecessary ambiguity and distraction. [Sic] means more than what the ALWD Guide or The Bluebook suggest.  That is, although it’s true that [sic] can mean grammar or spelling error, it can also mean the presence of unexpected language or phrasing.  The Redbook, in fact, suggests that [sic] can be used to indicate either an error or an “oddity” in quotation.  

Miriam-Webster’s usage notes give this example. The Toronto Maple Leafs are not, in fact, the Toronto Maple Leaves.  The name does not reflect a grammatical error but an unusual usage of the word “leaf.”  Thus, a writer quoting the phrase “Maple Leafs [sic]” isn’t indicating a spelling error (i.e., the misspelling of the plural form of ‘leaf’) but instead is indicating an unexpected or novel usage of the word “leaf.”  So, when a writer uses [sic], particularly where there isn’t an obvious error, [sic]’s meaning may be ambiguous to the reader.

 In the case of Scalia’s sentence, the error of “impact on” wasn’t obvious to me, and so I was confused and distracted by its use.  I thought perhaps he was pointing to a grammatical error that I didn’t recognize, or, now that I’ve checked The Redbook, I think maybe he might have been pointing out one of those “oddities” The Redbook refers to.   I’m still not sure.

 I researched what Justice Scalia might have meant when he wrote “impact on [sic].”  The Redbook told me that “impact” as a verb is of “questionable” use, and that better choices would be “affect” or “influence.” So maybe Justice Scalia was signaling this questionable use. But both the ALWD Guide and The Bluebook say that [sic] should follow the error, and the ALWD Guide emphasizes that [sic] should be inserted “immediately after the word containing the mistake.” So, if Justice Scalia was using [sic] to indicate this disfavored usage, then [sic] should have followed “impact” rather than “on.”

Regarding the preposition “on,” The Redbook suggested that “on” is a preposition that commonly relates its object to another word based on the concept of space. So, perhaps Justice Scalia was signaling that “on” was misused in the phrase “impact on the right of free expression” because the relationship between St. Paul’s ordinance and the right of free expression is not one of space.  If that were Justice Scalia’s concern, then perhaps he used [sic] to signal to the reader that a more deftly written sentence would have left out “on” and simply said “impact the right of free expression.”

But, even then, perhaps Justice Scalia was not signaling that “on” was an “error” to be fixed at all.  Maybe he simply meant that “impact on” was an unexpected usage or an oddity.  The Redbook offers that “[t]he use of prepositions is highly idiomatic: there are no infallible rules to guide you in deciding what preposition to use with a particular word (emphasis added).  If that’s the case, then, Justice Scalia’s [sic] might have been expressing that “impact on” is an unexpected or unusual usage in the sentence’s context.

Ultimately, I wondered why Justice Scalia didn’t just change “impact on” to “[affect]” if that was his concern.  Both The ALWD Guide and The Bluebook would have allowed him to do so. But I think I can understand why Justice Scalia might not want to change St. Paul’s specific word choice.  If he made that kind of change, he would be doing more than addressing a simple and obvious error in the text, as he would do if he changed a comma to a semi-colon, corrected a misspelling, or changed a singular verb to a plural one.  Arguably, by changing “impact” to “affect,” Justice Scalia might actually have altered the meaning of St. Paul’s argument ever so slightly.  And, because he was quoting St. Paul, changing meaning is a legitimate concern.

Even after my research, I’m still not sure what Justice Scalia had in mind with “impact on [sic].”  But I am sure that I was distracted by its use, and I focused more on [sic] than what Justice Scalia was saying about the merits of St. Paul’s argument.  I wonder what would have happened if Justice Scalia had just left the quote alone.  While I don’t have scientific proof for my suggestion, I imagine most readers would easily understand the general meaning of “impact on” as it was used in the St. Paul’s quote.  It seems that the use of [sic] in the sentence attracts the reader’s attention to an unimportant point and wastes the reader’s time.  

The second thing to consider when thinking about [sic]’s persuasive use is that note that [sic] can be interpreted as a sneer—it can, in a contemptuous way, needlessly call attention to others’ errors. Miriam-Webster’s usage notes refer to this as problem of “etiquette”; in the context of legal writing, we might think of it as a problem of professionalism. Miriam-Webster says that [sic] can be used to “needlessly mak[e] a value judgment on someone else’s language habits.”  Even Garner’s Modern English Usage says that [sic] can be used “meanly,” as a way to show the writer’s sense of superiority. The Redbook says, notably, that [sic] “should never be used as a snide way to highlight the errors of another writer.”  But Miriam-Webster points out that “sometimes pedantic condescension is precisely what [the writer is] going for.” Bottom line:  don’t use a “sneering [sic].”

In the context of writing persuasively in the law, I’d take the concern about the sneering [sic] a bit further:  A sneering [sic] not just about etiquette or professionalism; using [sic] to point out an error in a party’s argument can also represent an appeal to a logical fallacy, the ad hominem argument.  The ad hominem argument is a fallacious argument that gets its strength from undermining a logical, reasoned argument by attacking the character of a person making the argument. This usage might be popular in situations where a writer uses [sic] to implicitly suggest that the argument contained in quotation cannot be trusted because the quote’s author is incapable of writing well.  In other words, using [sic] can distract the reader from an arguments’ merit and instead implicitly suggest to the reader there is something untrustworthy about the argument because of the writing errors of the author. If it’s the case that the errors represent an untrustworthy argument, there’s nothing fallacious about using [sic]. But, when the legal writer knows that [sic] is an implicit attack on the character of another, than [sic] is a problem.

So, where does this analysis of [sic] leave the legal writer?  First, it should leave the legal writer with the sense that correcting errors in other people’s writing is not only an accuracy problem but also a rhetorical one. That is, when writers choose to use [sic] or not, they make rhetorical choices.  Moreover, it should leave the writer with the sense that [sic] can be either a helpful corrective or an unhelpful distraction, and that the writer needs to understand these potential rhetorical effects on the audience before making a choice about using [sic].

Here are some best practices for using [sic] to correct an error in the quotation of another writer.

• When possible, prefer not to use [sic]. Unless it really matters, don’t use [sic] to indicate an error or an odd or unexpected usage, I’d argue that Justice Scalia would have lost nothing—not accuracy, understandability, or influence--by leaving the quote from the City of St. Paul alone and avoiding [sic].  No reader would be confused that the phrase “impact on” was attributable to the City of St. Paul and not Justice Scalia.  And the phrase itself is not obviously “wrong.”  So, no harm, no foul.
• Prefer paraphrasing instead. If you can avoid quoting a passage with an error and a paraphrase would work just as well, do that.  I think Justice Scalia could have been just as effective in his writing if he had paraphrased St. Paul’s argument like this: “St. Paul argues that the City did not intend its ordinance to affect the accused person’s free expression . . . .” Would the reader’s experience have been worse if Justice Scalia had paraphrased that portion of the quotation? 
• If paraphrasing won’t work, prefer to fix the error. When an error must be corrected, or the error is distracting, correct it according to the ALWD Guide and The Bluebook rules rather than use [sic].  Frankly, correcting the error is a kinder, more professional thing to do. The Redbook agrees: “[I]t is better to correct those minor mistakes using brackets.” There are some instances, however, where correcting an error in a quote may not be the best option.  For example, you may not want to put your words in the mouth of your opponent.  In that case, [sic] might be best.  But, if the exact words aren’t that important, don’t quote the problematic content in first place.  Paraphrase instead.
• If nothing else works, use [sic]. If rigorous accuracy in representing the original quotation is a must, then use [sic].  For example, rigorous accuracy might be needed when quoting statutes.  Another situation that would call for using [sic] to indicate errors in a quotation might be when a legal writer is quoting written or transcribed witness testimony.  If altering the testimony might be viewed as unethical or deceptive, then use [sic].  But don’t use [sic] repeatedly to indicate the same error by the same quoted author; one [sic] should be enough to put your reader on notice of the repeated mistake.

Thanks for reading! What are your thoughts on [sic]?

Kirsten Davis teaches at Stetson University College of Law and in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She is the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Legal Communication. The Institute’s mission is to study legal communication issues and provide programming and training that improves legal communication skills. Among other things she’s up to right now, she’s currently serving on the Florida Bar Association’s Special Committee on Professionalism. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not intended to be legal advice. You can reach Dr. Davis at [email protected].

Using E-Prime to Add Clarity and Save Words

    I hope you are all enjoying 2022 so far.  As you look for ways to refresh your writing in the new year, consider using E-Prime.  Christopher Wren first introduced me to E-Prime, which “’refers to a subset of English that shuns any form of the verb ‘to be.’”  See Christopher Wren, E-Prime Briefly:  A Lawyer Writes in E-Prime, Mich. Bar J. 52, http://www.michbar.org/file/barjournal/article/documents/pdf4article1187.pdf (July 2007). In other words, to write in E-Prime, a drafter should avoid most “to be” verbs.

    While removing all forms of “to be” might sound daunting, I promise you will like the resulting clear, concise writing.  For attorneys and students who struggle with word limits, tightening sentences through E-Prime will usually save words.  Moreover, E-Prime requires writers to focus on the actor without using “is” as a definition, and thus increases precision.   

    As Mark Cohen explained:  “Would you like to clarify your thinking? Construct more persuasive arguments? Improve your writing? Reduce misunderstandings? You can. Just avoid using the verb to be.”  Mark Cohen, To Be or Not to Be--Using E-Prime to Improve Thinking and Writing,  https://blogs.lawyers.com/attorney/contracts/to-be-or-not-to-be-using-e-prime-to-improve-thinking-and-writing-65489/ (Nov. 2020).   Cohen listed many examples of how E-Prime adds clarity, including by revealing the observer and forcing us to avoid “passing off our opinions as facts.”  Id. 

    Wren also provides great examples of E-Prime removing passive voice and shortening clauses.  Wren, A Lawyer Writes in E-Prime, at 52.  Here are two of Wren’s examples:

Before:   Doe’s assertion that he was prejudiced by the joint trial is without merit.

After E-Prime:  Doe’s assertion that the joint trial prejudiced him lacks merit.

Before:  Generally, an order denying a motion for reconsideration is not an appealable order where the only issues raised by the motion were disposed of by the original judgment or order.

After E-Prime:  Generally, the party moving for reconsideration may not appeal an order denying the motion if the original judgment or order disposed of the only issues raised by the motion.

Id. 

    As a legal writing professor, I especially like the way E-Prime adds clarity and removes passive voice.  Since passive voice requires “to be” verbs, students who remove those verbs will also remove passives.  Thus, I now teach my students struggling with passive writing to look for all “to be” verbs followed by other verbs in their drafts.   Students who initially did not recognize passives tell me they now write more concisely by editing out “is,” “was,” and other “be” verbs.

    In his Michigan Bar Journal article, Wren shared that moving to E-Prime was not simple, in part “[b]ecause English­language communication relies so heavily on ‘to be’ constructions, removing them from the written form struck me as requiring more time and dedication than I thought I could muster, then or in the foreseeable future.”  Id.  When Wren first told me about E-Prime, I too found the idea of rewriting so many sentences impractical.  But after letting the idea percolate for a bit, I reached the same conclusion as Wren, who explained that in the end, “E­Prime helped me improve my writing” and “made my writing clearer by forcing me to pay more attention than usual to ensuring the reader will not have to guess who did what.”  Id.

    Thus, I urge you to give E-Prime a try.  With just a bit of practice, you can employ E-Prime to remove words from and add clarity to your appellate briefs, memos, and even emails.