writing-legal

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: writing-legal
description: "ALWAYS load BEFORE drafting, revising or grading LAW REVIEW prose — 'write the article', 'draft this Part', 'revise my note', 'polish the law review piece', 'does this sound like a law review article', 'edit my seminar paper', 'is this Part well written', 'should I write This Article or This paper', 'do I cross-reference by Part or Section', 'how do I transition between Parts', 'the sections don't connect', 'is pursuant to legalese'. Covers T14 flagship articles, student notes, seminar papers and any legal scholarship carrying footnotes and Bluebook short forms. This skill carries ONLY what is additional to the base register: load `writing-general` alongside it — the diction, tic, vindicated-phrase and formatting rules live there and are assumed here. Do NOT load this for a finance or accounting journal submission (use `writing-econ`) or for a comment letter, memo, brief or professional email (`writing-general` alone) — importing a law review rule into either of those makes the prose worse."
user-invocable: false
---

# Legal register (`legal`)

**What this skill carries** — grep `references/` for any subject the names below miss:
!`d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"`

**The base is `writing-general`, and it is assumed loaded alongside this file.** Everything below is
what is *additional* for law review prose. Nothing from the base is restated here.

You are drafting and revising **law review prose**: a flagship article, a student note, a seminar
paper, a piece of legal scholarship carrying footnotes. Voice, citation form and register follow the
conventions below.

Everything here is measured, not asserted. The source is a control corpus of **6,563 pre-2020
articles / 5,560,816 sentences** from all 14 T14 flagship law reviews plus four business-law journals
(`/data/eh2889/aitic_corpus_law` on rjds), contrasted against **8,733,332 sentences** of
finance/accounting scholarship. Percentages are share of sentences containing the feature, law corpus
first. Rates written `n/M` are hits per million sentences.

## Register: what actually distinguishes this corpus

| feature | law | finance | do |
|---|---|---|---|
| `we` | **0.87%** | 7.75% | Avoid the authorial `we`. It is nine times rarer here. Prefer the impersonal construction or `This Article`. |
| `we find / show / document` | **0.02%** | 0.58% | Effectively absent — 29× rarer. Never open a claim this way. Say what is true, then cite. |
| `supra` / `infra` / `id.` | **1.91%** | 0.00% | Bluebook short forms are the norm and appear in roughly one sentence in fifty. |
| quotation marks | **8.36%** | 1.68% | Quote sources directly and often — five times the rate of the finance register. |
| `court` / `holding` / `held` / `statute` / `doctrine` | **6.41%** | 0.73% | The vocabulary of authority is the substance, not decoration. |
| semicolons | **4.33%** | 2.27% | Twice the finance rate. Long coordinate structures are idiomatic here. |
| `may` / `might` | **3.56%** | 1.99% | Hedging is register-appropriate. Do not strip it out to sound decisive. |
| `Part I` / `Part II` | **0.20%** | 0.00% | Cross-reference by **Part**, never by "Section 2". |
| `This Article` | **0.06%** | 0.00% | The self-reference. Capital A. `This Note` for student work. |
| `This paper` | 0.02% | **0.28%** | Wrong register. Do not write it. |
| parentheticals | 1.93% | **4.73%** | Less parenthetical throat-clearing than the finance register; put the qualification in a footnote. |
| `regression` / `coefficient` | 0.05% | **2.25%** | Empirical vocabulary is 45× rarer here. If the Article is empirical, it still narrates rather than tabulates. |

## Conventions

- **Footnotes carry the citations.