Legal Drafting by Design: A Unified Approach

Designed for upper-level survey legal drafting courses, this groundbreaking text explains drafting using a common vocabulary that applies to any legal document based on a fundamental rule structure, including statutes and other forms of public drafting as well as contracts and other forms of private drafting. This unified drafting approach gives students a common denominator approach to drafting all kinds of legal documents. In addition, students can use the techniques they’ve learned to deconstruct, interpret, and revise any kind of legal document composed of rules. This common-sense approach of teaching/learning a single vocabulary and set of skills to use in drafting any rules-based legal document is an innovative model for U.S. legal drafting courses, though it has been used in other countries for decades.

Key Features:

• A unified approach that teaches students the general skills of drafting rules of law—duties, discretionary authority, and declarations, including their conditions in legal tests.
• Practice applying those skills to drafting a range of documents, including contracts, statutes, regulations, and other.
• Coverage of how courts interpret the rules and how to draft anticipating what the courts will do.
• An understanding of how law governs human behavior through the rules that students learn to draft.
• A wide range of classroom exercises on the detail of drafting.
• Additional drafting assignments, for use in and out of class, that help students learn how to use the rules and to accomplish clients’ goals.