This is a book for judges on how to write good and clear judgments.
Ross Guberman in Point Taken (2015) suggests various approaches that a judge can use to write the opening, the facts, and the legal analysis.
For each approach, he has usefully illustrated it with extracts from judgments of American and English judges like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Lord Denning, Richard Posner, and RBG.
The extracts show that a good judgment has a short opening that sets the issue down clearly. It has headings and subheadings. It uses brackets for synthesising authorities supporting the same proposition.
Ross also has a chapter on styles and usage of rhetorical devices, metaphors, and analogies.
As Lord Denning has suggested, let your writing live and breathe through a sympathetic style and a strong, dramatic arc. (P 162, quoting The Family Story, Lord Denning).
The idea is to convince the reader that you are morally as well as legally correct.
But if you can’t even convince your fellow judge, Ross ends with a chapter on how to write a proper dissenting judgment.
P.S. Ross did not comment in extenso, if at all, on the style of a dissecting judgment.
Should one use the ‘caustic’ approach used by Lord Atkin in his famous dissent, where he quoted Alice in Wonderland in his dissenting judgment in the 1942 case of Liversidge v Anderson, to ridicule his colleagues’ interpretation of a wartime regulation? He used the exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty.
