After my first year of law school, I put together a list of books and other resources I believed incoming law students and 1Ls would find helpful. This post updates and expands the list to include books helpful to law students, prelaw students, attorneys, and paralegals at any stage of their career. I’ve also added my own book about legal writing to the list.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon and Audible!
Ryan McCarl’s book Elegant Legal Writing is now available from the University of California Press. I’ve pasted the jacket copy and blurbs below.
I’ll continue to post excerpts and other useful content on the Elegant Legal Writing blog and on LinkedIn. By sharing posts you find helpful, you can help me spread the word about a book that can do a lot of good in the legal profession. It will help many attorneys, law students, and others write more confidently and persuasively.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. Ryan also maintains a free blog and email newsletter with legal writing tips, and regularly posts about legal writing and strategy on LinkedIn.
Thank you for your time and readership.
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Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter/X | Blog) is an attorney and law professor in Los Angeles.
It has been many years since I kept a personal blog, but I’ve decided to start again with a blog and email newsletter called “Second Stage.” You can read the first post and subscribe for free here.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. I’m not yet certain which direction Second Stage will go, but I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along.
We live in the age of the “productivity guru.” A productivity guru is someone who advertises his or her own productivity and suggests that others can achieve similar results. I enjoy the books and other content produced by some people who can be characterized as productivity gurus—Cal Newport, David Allen, Tim Ferriss, and Marie Kondo, for example. But they have thousands of imitators, and for many of these, the core of their brand is exaggeration: exaggeration of what they have accomplished and of what you, the consumer, can accomplish by following their lead.
The Daily Journal, a newspaper for California attorneys, just published my article Claim preclusion across jurisdictions: navigating the labyrinth.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. I approached this article in part as a teaching and writing exercise, and as a chance to articulate some of the problem-solving methods I apply to legal questions. I did my best to simplify a complicated subject while keeping the article readable.