Writing Legal

---
name: writing-legal
description: "ALWAYS load BEFORE drafting, revising or grading LAW REVIEW prose — 'write the article', 'draft this Part', 'revise my note', 'polish the law review piece', 'does this sound like a law review article', 'edit my seminar paper', 'is this Part well written', 'should I write This Article or This paper', 'do I cross-reference by Part or Section', 'is pursuant to legalese'. Covers T14 flagship articles, student notes, seminar papers and any legal scholarship carrying footnotes and Bluebook short forms. This skill carries ONLY what is additional to the base register: load `writing-general` alongside it — the diction, tic, vindicated-phrase and formatting rules live there and are assumed here. Do NOT load this for a finance or accounting journal submission (use `writing-econ`) or for a comment letter, memo, brief or professional email (`writing-general` alone) — importing a law review rule into either of those makes the prose worse."
user-invocable: false
---

# Legal register (`legal`)

**What this skill carries** — grep `references/` for any subject the names below miss:
!`d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"`

**The base is `writing-general`, and it is assumed loaded alongside this file.** Everything below is
what is *additional* for law review prose. Nothing from the base is restated here.

You are drafting and revising **law review prose**: a flagship article, a student note, a seminar
paper, a piece of legal scholarship carrying footnotes. Voice, citation form and register follow the
conventions below.

Everything here is measured, not asserted. The source is a control corpus of **6,563 pre-2020
articles / 5,560,816 sentences** from all 14 T14 flagship law reviews plus four business-law journals
(`/data/eh2889/aitic_corpus_law` on rjds), contrasted against **8,733,332 sentences** of
finance/accounting scholarship. Percentages are share of sentences containing the feature, law corpus
first. Rates written `n/M` are hits per million sentences.

## Register: what actually distinguishes this corpus

| feature | law | finance | do |
|---|---|---|---|
| `we` | **0.87%** | 7.75% | Avoid the authorial `we`. It is nine times rarer here. Prefer the impersonal construction or `This Article`. |
| `we find / show / document` | **0.02%** | 0.58% | Effectively absent — 29× rarer. Never open a claim this way. Say what is true, then cite. |
| `supra` / `infra` / `id.` | **1.91%** | 0.00% | Bluebook short forms are the norm and appear in roughly one sentence in fifty. |
| quotation marks | **8.36%** | 1.68% | Quote sources directly and often — five times the rate of the finance register. |
| `court` / `holding` / `held` / `statute` / `doctrine` | **6.41%** | 0.73% | The vocabulary of authority is the substance, not decoration. |
| semicolons | **4.33%** | 2.27% | Twice the finance rate. Long coordinate structures are idiomatic here. |
| `may` / `might` | **3.56%** | 1.99% | Hedging is register-appropriate. Do not strip it out to sound decisive. |
| `Part I` / `Part II` | **0.20%** | 0.00% | Cross-reference by **Part**, never by "Section 2". |
| `This Article` | **0.06%** | 0.00% | The self-reference. Capital A. `This Note` for student work. |
| `This paper` | 0.02% | **0.28%** | Wrong register. Do not write it. |
| parentheticals | 1.93% | **4.73%** | Less parenthetical throat-clearing than the finance register; put the qualification in a footnote. |
| `regression` / `coefficient` | 0.05% | **2.25%** | Empirical vocabulary is 45× rarer here. If the Article is empirical, it still narrates rather than tabulates. |

## Conventions

- **Footnotes carry the citations.** Substantive text goes in the body; support, parentheticals and
  qualifications go below the line. Never inline a full citation in body prose.
- **Cross-reference by Part** (`Part II.B`), not section number.
- **Signals matter**: `see`, `see also`, `cf.`, `but see`, `e.g.` — italicized, and each means
  something different. Do not use `see` where the source states the proposition directly.
- **`supra` / `infra` / `id.`** for short forms once a source is established.
- **Small caps** for journal names in citations.
- **Three body Parts is the default** — Background, the Argument with counterarguments folded in, the
  Prescription. Splitting into four or five Parts is an exception you reach, not a starting point.

## Volokh, run through the law corpus

The source guide is Volokh's *Academic Legal Writing*, distilled in full at
`${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/writing/references/volokh-distilled.md` — read it there for the full
text of any rule below. **Where this file and that guide disagree, this file controls.** Volokh's
prescriptions were checked against the same corpora and sorted three ways.

### Ship

| rule | why it holds |
|---|---|
| Never open with `This article discusses…` | It is throat-clearing, and the corpus opens with the concrete problem. Hook with the question or the controversy. |
| Confront counterarguments **in the Part that makes the claim** | Deferring them to a separate Part reads as evasion and forces the reader to hold the objection unanswered. |
| Read the original source | A case cited from a headnote, a treatise, or training data is an unverified claim presented as fact. Even Supreme Court opinions misstate precedents. |
| Synthesize precedents; do not summarize case by case | `Courts generally hold X, except when Y` — not a sequential digest. |
| Be precise with terms | `murder` ≠ `homicide` ≠ `killing`; `foreign-born` ≠ `noncitizen`; `children` is ambiguous until you give the age range. |
| Understate criticism | `mistaken`, not `idiotic`. Overstating raises your own burden of proof. |
| Unpack the metaphor | `slippery slope` and `chilling effect` hide the argument rather than making it. Name the mechanism. |

### Advisory

| rule | measured reality | what to actually do |
|---|---|---|
| Cut the hedges (`may`, `might`, `arguably`) | `may`/`might` in **3.56%** of law sentences, 1.8× the finance rate | Hedging is register-appropriate here. Cut `arguably` where it substitutes for the argument; leave the rest. |
| Prefer active voice | passive 7.91% law vs 8.55% finance — not a register marker | Ask who acted. Do not convert on principle. |
| Avoid long coordinate sentences | semicolons **4.33%**, twice the finance rate | Long coordinate structures are idiomatic in this corpus. Break the ones that lose the reader, not the ones that are merely long. |

### Dropped

| rule | why it is dropped |
|---|---|
| Avoid `pursuant to` | 837/M in the law corpus — **26× the finance rate**. This is not legalese to be purged; it is the legal register. Flagging it teaches the drafter to write like an economist. |
| Avoid the passive throughout | See above. The measurement refutes the rule as a register claim. |

## Vindicated in this corpus specifically

Beyond the shared list in `writing-general`: `To be sure,` runs **194.0/M** here (against 11.5/M in
finance) and `Admittedly,` **63.3/M**. `cuts against` (13.1/M) and `cuts the other way` are standard
analytical vocabulary. A reviewer who flags any of these as an AI tell is wrong, and the corpus says
so.