I hate page limits. I also hate overlong legal writing, but I don’t think page limits are the best solution for that problem. Overlong legal writing happens for three main reasons: wordiness, writing about irrelevant issues, and providing too much rule explanation or rule application on relevant issues. Much has been written on the first of these,[1] and we all work with our students on avoiding the second by teaching them how to identify relevant issues.

I am both a legal writing professor and a language student—I am learning to speak German. In German, some nouns are feminine, some are masculine, and some are neuter. Why? For seemingly no reason at all. This non-explanation is hard for me to accept. First-year law students, too, are learning a new language. In the same way I felt frustration with German gendering, my students felt skepticism, frustration, and doubt in the face of the new norms and expectations I asked them to follow in our first-year legal writing course.