This semester, I am lucky enough to be teaching a seminar I designed on bias in legal analysis and writing. The class has been a delight, and I am impressed every week by my thoughtful and dedicated students. In one…
Continue Reading Revisiting George Orwell and Good Writing

On a deep and fundamental level, we crave contrast. Without different colors in our environment, we would be blind because our vision requires contrast to function. Music is monotonous without variation in tone, pitch, and volume. Diet is unpalatable without…
Continue Reading The power of contrast

I recently had the honor of running into an old moot court student as opposing appellate counsel. It was in a case where there had been some heated language exchanged by trial counsel over an issue that was of serious…
Continue Reading More than "Frenemies."

It’s official: AI has passed the Uniform Bar Exam. GPT-4, the upgraded AI program released earlier this week by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, scored in the 90th percentile of actual test takers. “Guess you’re out of a job,” my wife said when…
Continue Reading GPT-4 Just Passed the Bar Exam. That Proves More About the Weakness of the Bar Exam Than the Strength of GPT-4.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can, among other things, compose music, play games, and generate student essays and examination answers. Indeed, ChatGPT has already been studied to assess its efficacy on law school examinations. One study, for example,…
Continue Reading ChatGPT and Legal Writing

Each week, the Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup presents a few tidbits of news and Twitter posts from the past week concerning appellate advocacy. As always, if you see something during the week that you think we should be sure…
Continue Reading Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, March 17, 2023

Most (all?) ancient languages lacked punctuation and capitalization. Egyptian heiroglyphs, Homeric Greek, Akkadian, etc. were all written in what amounts to all caps with no spaces and no way to tell (other than training and context) where one word or…
Continue Reading The substantive importance of punctuation in legal arguments; or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon

This is a guest post by Jayne Woods, Associate Teaching Professor of Law at University of Missouri School of Law. All faults in fixing bullets points are Professor Dysart’s. As Spring approaches, many legal writing faculty are gearing up to…
Continue Reading Guest Post: Can ChatGPT Prepare Me for Oral Argument?

When your appellate practice focuses heavily on constitutional issues, as mine does, it is hard not to look at news stories and imagine the upcoming litigation. I had that reaction when I saw what is only a bill in Florida,…
Continue Reading Licensing Paid Blogs?

What appellate lawyers should know about ChatGPT and rhetoric based on ChatGPT’s response to the question.
Continue Reading The Rhetoric of ChatGPT:  What ChatGPT Had to Say About Its Connection to Rhetoric and What We Can Learn from That Response

After judging a regional round of the National Appellate Advocacy Competition this weekend in Los Angeles, it was apparent immediately that the law students participating in this competition demonstrated intelligence, talent, and persuasiveness. Indeed, the participants were quite impressive and…
Continue Reading Advice for Law Students on Oral Argument

This past weekend I was at a conference in Las Vegas. At the conference, my colleague Diana Simon presented on her recent book–The (Not Too Serious) Grammar, Punctuation, and Style Guide to Legal Writing. During the social time after the…
Continue Reading ChatGPT & Grammar

“I’m glad you have to write the reply brief, not me.” That’s the whole email I received from a prominent appellate advocate who had written an amicus brief supporting my position after he had read opposing counsel’s brief. The difficulty…
Continue Reading When Your Opponent’s Brief is a Headscratcher