Legal Reasoning and Legal Writing (Aspen Coursebook Series)

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Legal Reasoning and Legal Writingteaches students how to organize and incorporate a legal argument into strong and cogent writing for a variety of applications in legal practice. This clear and coherent text has been updated to address the new skills required for modern law practice. While the Ninth Edition still includes the fundamental tools that has made it one of the best-selling legal writing texts, it has been updated to incorporate current and more sophisticated material for students wishing to take their advocacy skills to the next level. Designed for utility in a wide range of legal writing courses, the book covers multiple types of legal writing, including office memos, appellate and motion briefs, client letters, and email correspondence, as well as all aspects of legal reasoning from rule-based analysis to strategies of persuasion. It also covers other key skills such as oral reports to supervisors, appellate and motion argument, tips about the realities of online law practice and modern changes in language and style. The Ninth Edition reflects the collective wisdom of three leaders in the legal writing discipline who together have over 90 years of experience teaching, writing and speaking about legal writing.

New to the Ninth Edition:

• New chapters 23-33 (The Shift to Persuasion).
  • The new chapters are thoroughly modernized and to incorporate the best ideas of the legal scholarship on persuasion in an accessible and clear fashion. The newly organized chapters reflect that legal writing courses might teach appellate briefs or motion briefs, or some combination, and make the assigning of chapters easier for all approaches.
• New content about theory of the case, motions, procedural posture and the client’s story.

Professors and student will benefit from:

• Clear coverage of the nuts and bolts of writing an office memo, a motion memo, and an appellate brief organized to make assigning chapters easier for all different course approaches.
• The authors’ paradigm for Organizing a Proof of a Conclusion of Law, which provides the best explanation available of the reasoning underlying the proof of a conclusion of law.
• Immersive pedagogy where students learn both to think like lawyers and to think like writers.
• A thoughtful look at all aspects of legal reasoning, from rule-based analysis to the strategy of persuasion
• An accessible approach that focuses on the process of writing timely examples and exercises from legal practice
• A full complement of sample documents in the Appendices