By Sam Singer
As a law student you’re taught that legal writing is technical writing. You’re taught to distrust the fine phrase and the elegant word. Strong legal writing, you’re told, resounds less in art than in science. This is only partly true, of course, and it’s not until you leave law school that you discover that the most celebrated legal writers are often the most artful ones. Like the best artists, exemplary legal writers have mastered their medium, but they’re also inclined to transcend it from time to time. So we nod approvingly when Justice Scalia, in the course of a caustic dissent in a high-profile anti-discrimination case, finds room for a Kurt Vonnegut reference; we’re charmed by Justice Rehnquist’s use of “bare minimum” to describe an Indiana law governing appropriate attire at strip clubs; and we marvel when a prominent federal judge wraps up a forcefully argued intellectual property opinion by advising the parties “to chill.”
In this permissive setting, it’s hard to fault Judge Scott Stucky of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces for channeling his inner crime novelist in an opinion he handed down last week. The opening sequence of U.S. v Weston may as well have been lifted from a Raymond Chandler novel. “There was something odd about the electric razor in the bathroom,” Stucky wrote.
Posted on June 23, 2009