LAST WEEK’S MAIL brought a copy of Eugene Volokh’s new book, Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers. I’ve looked at it over the weekend and it looks quite good; I plan to require my seminar students to buy it.

I’ve used Eugene’s Writing a Student Article piece since it came out, and found it helpful. This is in a similar vein, but there’s a lot more to the book. And the subject is important, and under-treated. As Alex Kozinski says in the introduction:

It is difficult to overstate the importance of a written paper for a young lawyer’s career, especially if the piece is published. Grades, of necessity, are somewhat grainy and subjective: is an A- that much better than a B+? Letters of recommendation can be more useful, but they still rely on someone else’s judgment, and they often have a stale booster quality to them. Words like “fabulous” and “extraordinary” lose their force by dint of repetition. . . .

A paper is very different. It is the applicant’s raw work product, unfiltered through a third-party evaluator. By reading it, you can personally evaluate the student’s writing, research, logic and judgment. . . . Writing a paper engages so much of the lawyer’s art that no other predictor of likely success on the job comes close. A well-written, well-researched thoughtful paper can clinch that law firm job or clerkship. It is indispensible if you aim to teach.

That’s absolutely right. That’s why I encourage my students who write first-rate papers to have them published, and I’m happy to say that quite a few have. (The law review note-writing process is nice, but there’s so much structure and hand-holding in that process that it’s a poor substitute for a true article, in my opinion, since it’s harder to judge the writer’s work, and self-starting character, from a note.) This book provides a lot of useful guidance for students — and, I suspect, rather a lot of junior faculty — in a slim and easy to assimilate form, on everything from how to choose a topic and title, to how to edit your own work, and deal with editors, to how to get published. I expect that it will do very well.