LawMeme is running a wonderful continuing feature, written by James Grimmelmann, to teach non-lawyers, and especially techies, how to read a legal brief:
Future lawyers spend three years in law school learning how to read and write legalese, but what serious geek has that kind of time to spare? This series will cover the basics of Legal; by the end of it, you should be ready to pick up a legal brief and know what’s going on and how to find out more.
To keep things close to reality, we’ll use as a case study a particularly important piece of recent legal writing: the good guys’ brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft. We’ll walk through the brief, seeing how the conventions of legal writing interact with the arguments Lessig and company are making.
If you’re at all interested in the topic, it’s well worth reading. (Part I; Part II; and more to come)
