The Redbook

A Manual on Legal Style, 3d Third Edition
BY: Bryan A- Garner
(American Casebook Series)



An indispensable aid for anyone who prepares legal documents ? including law students, law professors, practicing lawyers, and judges ? Garner's The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style provides the comprehensive guide to the essential rules of legal writing. It gives detailed, authoritative advice on grammar, style, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, footnotes, and citations, with illustrations in legal contexts.
The Redbook focuses on the special needs of legal writers, emphasizing the ways in which legal writing differs from other styles of technical writing. Its how-to sections cover editing and proofreading, numbers and symbols, overall document design, and more.
The Redbook also gives tips on preparing briefs and other court documents, opinion letters, demand letters, research memos, and contracts. It explains the correct usage of and provides everyday English translations for more than 1,000 words that are often troublesome to legal writers, 200 terms of art that take on new meanings in legal contexts, 800 words with required prepositions in certain contexts, and 500 stuffy phrases and needless legalisms.

The Redbook had its genesis in repeated requests that Bryan Garner received from law firms wanting a style manual for their writers. Such guides are commonplace within specialties: book publishers have The Chicago Manual of Style, newspapers have the Associated Press Style book, dissertation writers have The MLA Style Manual, and so on.

A style manual ensures consistency by codifying the stylistic choices that reflect the judgment of professional editors. Once learned, the stylistic guidelines spare writers and editors from the hand-wringing that takes place when a fastidious writer or editor must deal with any one of the thousands of knotty questions that occur to an alert mind. Seemingly only alert minds even bother with these matters—hence, only alert minds write well or edit well. Style manuals are for those who seek to do that.

The third edition of The Redbook builds on the first two as a kind of “restatement” of legal style. The widespread adoption of the book has been gratifying. Even more gratifying has been the willingness of so many professional legal writers to act as contributors of ideas. The board of editorial advisers lent their talent and hard work by vetting the manuscript and offering voluminous suggestions for improvement.

If you’re editing something, you ought to know why your edits make sense. You should be able to justify every edit you make, even if it’s just a punctuation mark. The Redbook is intended to be the definitive guide for considering the soundness of your edits.

About the Author

Bryan A. Garner is president of LawProse, Inc., and Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University.
The editor-in-chief of "Black's Law Dictionary", Garner is the author of several best-selling books, including "Garner's""Modern American Usage" and, with Justice Antonin Scalia, "Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts" and "Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges".

A Manual on Legal Style, Third Edition
BY: Bryan A- Garner
(American Casebook Series)