Every lawyer in America reaches for the same dictionary, and a man from Lubbock has been editing it for thirty years.
Bryan Garner has been editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary since 1995. That alone would earn him a place here. But the dictionary is the least of what he did. In 1990 he founded LawProse in Dallas and started teaching lawyers and judges the thing law school never taught them: how to write a sentence a reader can carry. Legal Writing in Plain English. The Winning Brief, a hundred tips for briefing that judges actually finish. Garner’s Modern English Usage, the reference the careful writers keep at the elbow.
Then he did something nobody expected. He sat down with Justice Antonin Scalia, the sharpest pen on the Supreme Court, and they wrote two books together. Making Your Case, on persuading judges. Reading Law, on how texts get read. A Texas usage editor and a Supreme Court justice arguing over commas, and the result is the best short course on advocacy in print.
What he teaches is what this Docket keeps circling. Cut the throat clearing. Put the actor before the verb. Say it once. Lead with the point. He is a large part of the reason a generation of lawyers stopped writing comes now and started writing what happened. He proved that plain is not simple. Plain is the hardest kind of clear.
The craft in Garner is humility. He treats the reader as the only person who matters, and the reader is a judge with two hundred other files on the desk. Write for that judge and you have written for everyone.
Bryan A. Garner (born 1958, Lubbock, Texas), editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary since 1995, founder of LawProse (1990), author of Legal Writing in Plain English, The Winning Brief, and Garner’s Modern English Usage, and co-author with Justice Antonin Scalia of Making Your Case (2008) and Reading Law (2012). He has taught at the University of Texas School of Law, among others.
