The “genesis” of George D. Gopen’s Writing from a Legal Perspective was “the energy and far-sightedness of Professor John Muller,” who requested that Prof. Gopen “create an advanced composition course for pre-law students” at the University of Utah in 1975.¹ A “national workshop on the subject” produced “a structure for the course” and, eventually, the textbook under consideration, which “includes many of the materials [Prof. Gopen has] developed for the course” in the intervening years and which has been “adapted . . . for use on the undergraduate level and at law schools” (p. VII).

Writing from a Legal Perspective opens with a chapter entitled “Lawyers and Language” (pp. 1-17) in which Prof. Gopen identifies lawyers’ audiences as “hostile” (p. 1) and moves on to discuss the difficulties of precision of language in general and for lawyers in particular, including comments on legal terminology in a historical perspective. Chapters, II, III and IV are, to my mind, not significantly different from writing texts for any audience: Prof. Gopen presents a “System of Self-Revision” that begins with a lengthy discussion of the problems created by the use of “weak verbs” and proceeds through a demonstration of the system (I shall return to this item).

Chapter III, “Words, Meanings, and Labels,” surveys the difficulties of definition, the changes in the English lexicon over time, and the dangers of reliance upon “labels.” Chapter IV focuses upon definition and closes with a demonstration of “The Definition of an Abstract Entity” by exploring “The Concept of ‘Team”’ and “The Concept of ‘Football”’ as a pattern for pre-law and law students who must struggle regularly with the clarification of abstract terminology. By this point, the students should have become sensitive to language and to the necessity of making thoughtful choices with respect to diction, sentence structure, and organization in a piece of writing.

In Chapter V, Prof. Gopen turns to "The Kinds of Writing Lawyers Do”: “agreements, briefs, memos, and letters” (p. 109). Here the text becomes particular to its primary audience—the pre-law and law students—along a route that includes the art of composing instructions, dealing with inferences (Prof. Gopen identifies “inferences” as “a relative of [the] two language demons,” obscurity of expression and ambiguity of meaning, discussed in earlier chapters [p. 140]), and “Determining Facts,” a section that rests primarily on an exercise in sorting out the facts in a traffic accident case. Unfortunately, there is no help for the users of the text in evaluating their responses to the tasks in the exercise: reporting on six questions that require establishing “‘facts,”’ sorting them out according to their usefulness to the clients’ case; identifying the “extra information” needed for the case; and preparing the “Statement of Fact insofar as you are able, given the present information” (pp. 151-152).

Chapter VII, “Translation,” leads readers into consideration of “critical reading abilities” through the analysis of four newspaper articles. Students are instructed to pose three questions: “What does the article promise to tell us? . . .What does the article actually tell us? . . . What does the article fail to tell us?" (p. 163). Prof. Gopen reminds his audience that the activities in the text are cumulative: “This process will afford you an opportunity to use your knowledge of the nature of definitions, inferences, and facts discussed in previous chapters” (p. 163). He also assures them that “You may even find yourself well amused by this process” (p. 164). For the first article Prof. Gopen provides thirty-three questions for consideration along with his answers. He then proposes as an exercise a rewriting of the article (p. 173). Questions accompany articles two and three; article four is offered as an exercise without assistance. A final task directs the students to find articles similar to the samples, to compose their own questions, and to “rewrite the article, assuming whatever knowlege necessary to fill in its gaps. Be sure that your article fulfills the promises that the original left unfulfilled.” Admirable as the exercise is, and excepting the fact that the sample articles refer to situations at law, the chapter is a good but standard approach to both critical reading and to re­vision (in the broadest sense).

The final chapter, “Introduction to Consistency,” opens with some comments on “the concept of precedent” in the American legal system, including the caveat that “the perfection of a system of precedents is... only an ideal,” and moves on to “two problems of Persuasion: (1) how to recognize the difference between an argument and a conclusion; and (2) how to keep a series of related arguments consistent with one another” (pp. 180-182). The first exercise requires the readers to set fines and give reasons for those fines in what becomes Prof. Gopen’s longest analysis-cum-exercise in the test—"The Left-Turn Problem.” Before proceeding to one student’s responses to the exercise, Prof. Gopen discusses “Argument v. Conclusion” and a method for distinguishing one from the other: study the main verbs; “Ask the questions ‘Why?’ of the statement”; “Juxtapose the statement with its negative” (pp. 184-186). Having analyzed the students’ responses, Prof. Gopen classifies them according to three principles implicit in the responses (pp. 203-210). He then applies the principles to five of the responses (pp. 210-213). I found the chapter heavy going despite a reassurance from the author that at this point I should “be starting to understand how all of the earlier discussion in this book of sentence structure, weak verbs, changing meanings for words, and the nature of the definition process fit into the argumentation process” (p. 215).

The final section of the chapter, “Introduction to Complexity,” points out that writing about issues that “affect our lives and for which there are at least two strong and mutually exclusive arguments” can “make writing . . . extraordinarily difficult (as if writing were not difficult enough as is) . . ." (pp. 218-219). Prof. Gopen reminds the readers that their “role” as writers in such cases depends on the perennial triad of purpose, audience and situation; that “great involvement can mislead you into thinking that you are ‘right,”’ and that preparing both sides of the argument “is a sobering experiment . . . that can keep you free from a kind of egoism that can destroy a lawyer’s effectiveness” (pp. 219-220). Here follow two exercises, the second of which is designed for several sessions; some comments turning on the observation that “All this has been but a beginning”; and a final exercise requiring the preparation of an argument in “The Case of the Smouldering Smut Smiters” that might, Prof. Gopen helpfully suggests, serve the students well if they compare their work with their responses to the first case in the text, “Sam Square v. the Paris Cinema.”

In my view, the most troublesome section of Prof. Gopen’s text is Chapter II, in which he presents a “system of self­revision” structured “upon the notion that the stronger the verb is, the healthier the sentence will tend to be” (p. 21). Six and one­half pages of discussion of weak verbs follow; then there is a "Note on the Passive” that runs three and one-half pages; finally there is "The System,” “a relatively objective method by which you can overcome major problems and discover for yourself how much of your thought actually has reached the paper” (p. 31). There are six steps:

Prof. Gopen next describes the application of the system to a student’s attempt to describe a riot: he does not say how long the conference lasted, but he concludes many pages later with the assurance that such blossomings-forth (four sentences to five pages) are frequent upon application of the system, and that “Nothing in this book is of greater importance than the system just described” (p. 41).

I suspect that only the most highly motivated of advanced composition students will appreciate that the system acknowledges their “advanced” grasp of grammar or will apply the system unless coerced by the instructor. It is possible that taking students through the system once will help sensitize them to the necessity of making careful choices at every stage of the composing process, but students and instructors alike might balk at the time involved in applying the method to every piece of writing in the course.

I have other, but minor, reservations about Writing from a Legal Perspective: in discussing the difficulties of defining an abstract concept, Prof. Gopen uses “team” and “football”: I expected a demonstration involving a legal concept. The exercise that follows the demonstration also uses football—perhaps on the basis that many students, even in law school, know more about football than about the law (pp. 95-106). The exercise that closes the chapter includes only one pertinent term, “Legal rights” (p. 107).

Further, as with other texts I have examined, there are many more typographical errors than should be tolerated in a writing text. Some of them (like the error in the quotation of step 5 of the system) interfere with the meaning of the sentence; others result in what some might regard as serious punctuational errors; some seem to be mere carelessness at some stage of the proofreading process: “‘chauvanist,”’ for example (p. 54).

On the whole, Writing from a Legal Perspective is indeed a textbook for advanced writers; except for the lengthy comments on weak and passive verbs, it assumes a well-developed ability to write and it addresses the particular problems of most legal writing. I suggest that Prof. Gopen’s text, and in particular most of his exercises, will serve well for those advanced composition teachers confronted with students who intend to become lawyers.²