Just like the title, this book is a great guide to "Academic Legal Writing." Step by step, the author takes you through the process of writing a publishable legal article. Every aspect is covered: from how to form a thesis to how to publicize and publish your finished product. Every law review student should read this book while writing his or her student Note.

Former clerk to the Supreme Court and Professor at UCLA Eugene Volokh has given a remarkable gift to the legal community that would be a bargain at twice the price. It delivers pragmatic and thoughtful advice in a remarkably clear and lucid style. Moreover, it is not simply clear for law books--frankly, a low bar to pass--Volokh writes for the ordinary public daily on his eponymous blog (where you can read the first chapter of this book), and the skills required for that task manifest themselves in this work.

Academic Legal Writing is also extremely systematic. Every aspect of the paper is taken into consideration, from the approach to research, to avoiding off-putting humor or politically charged language, time tables for submissions, and so on, even including how to draft letters to professors and law reviews asking them to look over your work and to consider it for publication.

Academic Legal Writing is really in a class by itself. That said, perhaps I can indicate its greatness by invoking a few other names. Academic Legal Writing is a perfect companion volume to Bryan Gardner's The Elements of Legal Style. It is as clear and concise and accessible as Marvin Chirelstein's Concepts and Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts, and it deserves to be as ubiquitous and is certainly as valuable, thoughtful, and comprehensive as Joseph Glannon's E&E Civil Procedure and Erwin Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies. If you know these books, you should be going "wow." If you don't, and you are going to law school, I advise reading all of them. (Also Getting to Maybe, which I never found compelling, but am in the distinct minority view on.)

I read Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk's Scholarly Writing for Law Students, which is also good and which Volokh recommends. Academic Legal Writing appears to be a very conscious next step beyond that book. In a perfect world, buying and reading both would be advisable. In the real world, I read Scholarly Writing once, Academic Legal Writing many, many times. Academic Legal Writing is your desert island pick.

Please do yourself a favor and read this book. If you don't, you will simply be doing all of your competitors a likely unrequited kindness.

One final note: Professor Volokh is a conservative of the thoughtful and sober variety. I am a liberal of the sort who avidly studies the Endangered Species List to see if "Thoughtful Conservatives" have been listed yet. This is not an issue: Professor Volokh's political beliefs are discernible in this book only by the most careful parsing: in some of his examples, he points out the misleading use of statistics in gun violence, an academic preoccupation of his. You could then do the math and figure out that he has at least one conservative leaning. Otherwise, his politics would be utterly inscrutable. And, frankly, this book would be on my bookshelf even if Professor Volokh had say, written a memo arguing that the Geneva Conventions were outdated and pointless. John Yoo, your path to redemption is clear.