Ryan McCarl is a partner at Rushing McCarl LLP and author of the forthcoming book Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). McCarl has represented plaintiffs and defendants in high-stakes litigation in many practice areas. In addition to his litigation experience, he founded a tech startup and served on the UCLA School of Law faculty as an Advanced Legal Writing teacher and a research fellow in artificial intelligence law and policy.
Mr. McCarl has drafted briefs and motions in cases before state and federal trial and appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. His expertise in legal writing and strategy helps clients develop innovative and successful arguments in complex disputes.
Mr. McCarl’s arguments and briefs have been dispositive in several cases. A Tenth Circuit panel agreed with his claim preclusion argument and disposed of a decade-long antitrust suit against a global medical supplies manufacturer. The New York Court of Appeals cited a brief he drafted in establishing a right to a cautionary jury instruction in cross-race eyewitness identification cases. And the Illinois Supreme Court relied on a First Amendment overbreadth and due process argument he developed in unanimously striking down an Illinois statute prohibiting non-consensual audio recording.
Mr. McCarl clerked for the Honorable David M. Ebel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and worked as an associate at several prominent firms. He has published articles and book chapters on diverse topics including substantive due process, claim preclusion, constitutional vagueness doctrine, sovereign debt arbitration, and homeowners associations.
Mr. McCarl earned his J.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a member of the Chicago Journal of International Law. He earned an M.A. in International Relations and B.A. in Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he was a captain of the track team and broke the school record in cross country. He also earned an M.A. in Education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and taught high school history and geography.
Mr. McCarl is admitted to practice in California as well as the District of Columbia (inactive) and before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits.
Selected publications and talks
- Elegant Legal Writing (blog, email newsletter, and forthcoming book)
- Second Stage (blog and email newsletter)
- The Limits of Law and AI, 90 U. Cin. L. Rev. (2022)
- Writing Elite Briefs and Motions (CLE prepared for the State of Texas Office of the Attorney General in April 2022)
- Legal Writing Fundamentals
- Artificial Intelligence 101 for Lawyers
- Business Property Insurance May Cover COVID-19-related Losses, Daily Journal (2020)
- AI Without Math: Making AI And ML Comprehensible, AI Pulse (2019)
- Claim Preclusion Across Jurisdictions: Navigating the Labyrinth, Daily Journal (2019)
- ICSID Jurisdiction Over International Mass Investment Arbitrations: Due Process and Default Rules, 51 Stan. J. Int’l L. 173 (2015)
- When Homeowners Associations Go Too Far: Political Responses to Unpopular Rules in Common Interest Communities, 43 Real Estate L.J. 453 (2015)
- Incoherent and Indefensible: An Interdisciplinary Critique of the Supreme Court’s Void-for-Vagueness Doctrine, 42 Hastings Const. L.Q. 73 (2014)
- Creditors’ remedies, Sovereign Debt Management (with Mark Weidemaier) (Oxford Univ. Press 2014)