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25 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. i (2021)

handle is hein.journals/jlwriins25 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITOR'S NOTE

Welcome to Volume 25 of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute! I'm
pleased to greet you in my first year as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal. The theme of my first year
in this position has been never a dull moment! This is our second volume that's been produced
in the Time of the Plague, namely the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020-2021. We were just
entering lockdown when Volume 24 was published, and the work for Volume 25 was done
entirely during the pandemic.
This past year has been a tremendous challenge for everyone in the legal writing
community, to say the least, with the overnight move to teaching online, the stress of COVID-19
and the political environment in the United States, and the need to design remote online courses,
in addition to all of our typical teaching tasks. In the midst of all of this, the Journal's Editorial
Board has risen to the occasion and produced an impressive Volume 25. We had already been
planning our series of essays on the Multigenerational Teaching of Legal Writing for Volume
25. As the pandemic waged on and 2020 also brought protests for racial justice and worries
about the erosion of democratic institutions in the United States leading up to the 2020 election,
we decided to add a second set of essays on the theme of Disruption. Our community came
through with a set of thought-provoking essays on what it means to have our usual lives
disrupted by unexpected traumas, and how we can continue to serve as true teachers and role
models for our students in such unprecedented times. Lindsey Gustafson, my predecessor as
Editor-in-Chief, has written a thoughtful introduction to our Volume 25 essays, noting common
themes and threads that span the two sets of essays.
Alongside our two sets of essays, we are also happy to publish three remarkable articles,
each of which explores an aspect of how attorneys attempt to communicate in the clearest and
most persuasive ways possible:
*     Brian Larson's Precedent as Rational Persuasion pioneers empirical research in how
judges and lawyers make arguments and decisions by using cited cases in their legal
arguments. The article analyzes a body of judicial opinions and the advocates' briefs that
gave rise to them. In terms of the ways that advocates and judges used these cases,
Professor Larson found that rule-based case uses were twice as common as legal
analogies, which were twice as common as policy arguments.
*     Brad Desnoyer's E-Memos 2.0: An Empirical Study of How Attorneys Write describes the
results of a study in which over 100 practicing attorneys reviewed and ranked sample,
substantive e-memos and answered questions about e-memo preferences and habits. The
results of Professor Desnoyer's study revealed that attorneys prefer e-memos featuring
explicit and detailed legal reasoning, presented concisely, logically, and with the
conclusion provided at the beginning. The article also proposes steps for drafting e-
memos and best practices for teaching students how to write them.
*     John Larsen's Using Visuals to Better Communicate Logic in Legal Reasoning
recommends that legal professionals create and use visual maps to guide legal reasoning,
based on his theory that law and the complex facts legal professionals confront are not

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