Justice Scalia and Legal Writing

Last week I was in Washington, D.C., for the Federalist Society‘s National Lawyers Convention.  This year the Society honored the legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a great friend of the Society. 

One of the panels, which was hosted by the Society’s Litigation Practice Group, was entitled “How Justice Scalia’s Writing Style Affected American Jurisprudence.”  A video of the panel is available here, and I highly recommend watching it.  It is one of the best panels I have seen at Convention.

The panel featured several former Scalia clerks, including the moderator, Justice Joan Larsen of the Michigan Supreme Court.  The clerks talked about Justice Scalia’s approach to drafting opinions. Kannon Shanmugam, a partner at Williams & Connolly, called Scalia “the king of the syllogism.”  He emphasized the importance that Scalia put on sound reasoning.  He also recalled Scalia’s desire to write concise opinions.  He recalled how Scalia once took some time to edit a draft opinion from 14 pages to 10.

While several of the panelists noted that Scalia was careful to not too personally criticize his colleagues on the bench, Prof. Toni M. Massaro did discuss how Scalia’s writing style, particularly some of his caustic one-liners, might offend the general public and be the type of writing we do not want students to emulate.

The other panelists, Prof. Brian T. Fitzpatrick and Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, provided great insight into how Scalia’s chambers were run.  For example, the clerks had to pull from the library all of the sources used in an opinion and sit down with Justice Scalia and the other clerks to carefully go through each opinion to check the accuracy of the substance of the citations.

Rather than recount all of the fun stories provided in the panel, I will just once again commend it to you.  The whole panel is less than an hour and a half long.  It is well worth the time!