Summer Reading to Improve Your Legal Writing

I get it. It's summer.

The exams are (hopefully) behind you, the sun is out, and the last thing you want to hear from a law professor are the words "reading” and “list" in the same sentence.

So let me be clear from the outset: this is not a reading list in the traditional sense. I am not asking you to sit indoors with a casebook while everyone else is at the beach. Rest is not optional; it is necessary, and you should take it.

But here is the thing. Good legal writing is not built exam season by exam season. It is built slowly, over years, by reading well-written things and noticing, almost without trying, how they work. Summer, with no deadlines breathing down your neck, is actually the best time to do this, because you can read for pleasure and let the writing lessons sink in quietly.

So, pack one or two of the following in your beach bag (or your Kindle, if you prefer not to get sand in your books). None of them are long. All of them will make you a better legal writer.

1) George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

Not a law essay at all, but an essay about writing itself. Orwell's central argument is that vague, cluttered prose is not just ugly; it is a way of hiding from the reader (and often from yourself) that you have not actually thought your argument through clearly.

Every law student should absorb his famous rules: prefer the short word to the long one, cut the word you don't need, prefer the active voice, and avoid stale metaphors/jargon. Read it once, and you will find yourself hearing Orwell's voice in your head every time you write "in relation to" instead of "about," or "it is submitted that" instead of just … submitting it.

2) Lord Denning's judgments — start with Hinz v Berry [1970] 2 QB 40

If Orwell tells you the rules, Lord Denning shows you what happens when a lawyer actually follows them. Denning is one of the most quoted judges in English legal history, and it is not because his arguments were always persuasive; it is because you cannot forget how he wrote.

Look at how Hinz v Berry opens: "It happened on April 19, 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent." Two short sentences. No Latin, no throat-clearing, no fifteen-word opening subordinate clause. He puts you at the scene before he discussing the law. Read a few of his judgments this summer and pay attention to how short his sentences often are, and how consistently he prefers plain, concrete language.

3) Lord Atkin in Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562

This offers a complementary lesson to Denning's, i.e. it is not primarily about simplicity but about structure. Lord Atkin had to take a genuinely difficult, contested area of the law (when does a manufacturer owe a duty of care to a consumer they have never met?) and turn it into a principle that a first-year student can still recite from memory: the "neighbour principle."

What makes this worth reading as a writer, not just as a lawyer, is the discipline of it. Atkin does not simply announce his conclusion. He builds it (case by case, objection by objection) until the reader arrives at the rule feeling as though they discovered it themselves. That is what good legal argument does: it does not just tell the reader the answer, it walks them there.

4) Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

Not a law book, and, like Orwell, deliberately so. This is the shortest and most re-readable book on this list, and almost every practising lawyer I know still has a copy somewhere on their shelf. "Omit needless words" is the whole of legal writing advice in three words, and Strunk & White will drill it into you in about ten minutes of reading.

If you only have time for one book this summer, make it this one. It will not teach you any law. It will teach you how to say what you mean, which (as regular readers of this blog will hopefully know) is nine-tenths of the battle in a law essay.

To sum up:

· This summer, rest first. All of the above can wait until you actually want to read again.

· None of these require a highlighter or a set of exam notes. Read them the way you would read anything else you enjoy reading.

· What you are “training” is your ear, i.e. your sense of what a clear sentence sounds like versus a cluttered one.

· When term starts again, you will find that sentences that used to take you five attempts now come out right the first time. That is not magic. That is just what reading good writing does to you.

Enjoy the summer and happy reading!

P.S. For more advice on how to write first-class law essays, you can grab a copy of my book here.