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Guide to Legal Writing

Jan. 6, 2025

It was a dark and stormy January 2025

Taking a cue from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's much maligned opening sentence, your columnist is on the hunt for legal submissions that stand out for all the wrong reasons, with prizes for the best submissions.

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No, I am not referring to the state of the world or what at times rages within my psyche. The sophisticated reader will immediately supply the famous missing words: "It was a dark and stormy night." This sentence was popularized by Snoopy of "Peanuts" fame, as he sat on the roof of his doghouse typing the first line of his novel. But it first appeared more than a century earlier (followed by a semicolon) in the novel Paul Clifford, a must for your reading list. That opus, by ...

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