Since July 2015 I’ve been sporadically posting a series of tips for concision in legal writing. I suggested a total of twelve, and links to all of them are collected here:
fenc.es — be wrong on the internet, productively
Trace the map of reasonable disagreement. Break arguments into statements, rate confidence and importance, and find the crux.
Content guidelines overview
The section covers the naming and content of Internet-Drafts (I-Ds) including the required and recommended sections. There are lots of rules governing the content, developed over many years in order, which aim to ensure the readability and consistency of I-Ds. Please follow this section closely. The pages in this section are:
When Truth Becomes Hazardous: Navigating Information Through the Metacrisis | Frankly 153
Verification Handbook | DataJournalism.com
This book equips journalists with the knowledge to investigate on disinformation and media manipulation.
When Nature Calls: The Enshittification of Science and Its Enablers
Proof-of-work papers, policy laundering, and the collapse of self-correction
Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.
Producing The Perfect Token
The unspoken inference quality gap and how numerics determine if the inference you're paying for is worth it.
Minimum Queue Publishing - Wesley's notes
A strategy for writing more often without losing momentum
Soundings and Silences
In studying existing constitutions or in assisting with drafting a new one, it is impossible not to notice that formative decisions about what to say and what not to say as a constitution is being created bear heavily on later decisions about how to interpret what a constitution says or fails to say, including whether to construe any given silence or gap only as a source of insight or as a kind of performative utterance. Among the features of the United States Constitution that have been crucial to its success has been the widespread recognition of its connected structure that, despite its gaps—some deliberate and others unintended—invites understanding as a coherent, if at times internally inconsistent, whole. Constitutional silences, like silences of other kinds, are everywhere and come in many varieties. There are as many reasons to be silent as there are to speak and as many ways to hear meaning in the sounds of silence as there are to attribute meaning to statements. The first section of this essay distinguishes silences that open a constitutional conversation by leaving options on the table from those that shut conversation down by limiting the options to one. The second section separates silences that bear on the structure created by the Constitution from those that bear on the individual rights the Constitution protects against government infringement. The third section turns to the special case of silences in the Constitution’s rules of interpretation and asks whether the Supreme Court should be silent on a particular constitutional matter or should address it squarely, recognizing that whatever an authoritative interpreter says about what the Constitution itself says or omits can be evaluated only against the background alternative of somehow contriving to remain silent.
The Fiduciary Obligation
ROBERT FLANNIGAN; The Fiduciary Obligation, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3, 1 October 1989, Pages 285–322, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls
So I wrote a much longer thing explaining why Minnesota's anti-nudify tech law, while it might be well meaning, is TERRIBLY DRAFTED in a manner that almost guarantees it will be thrown out, giving Elon Musk a win. But also, I don't understand WHY MN legislators wrote such a bad law...
Techdirt
The Worst Person You Know Just Filed A Good First Amendment Lawsuit Against A Very Badly Drafted Nudify App Ban There's been a bunch of news this... techdirt.com/2026/07/30/the-worst-person-y…
