STUDIED: Opening statement at Nuremberg, 1945 · West Virginia v. Barnette, 1943
SIGNATURE: Plain words for enormous stakes. The short sentence after the long one. Writing his own.
The most serious courtroom assignment of the twentieth century went to a lawyer who never finished law school.
Robert Jackson read law the old way, as an apprentice in a Jamestown, New York office, with a single year of classes to his name. He argued his way up: a Solicitor General people crossed the street to hear, Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice. Then 1945, and an assignment with no precedent anywhere: chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg. He wrote the opening himself.
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.” One long sentence, built like a wave. Then he came back down to plain ground and stayed there for hours, and the plainness is why it held.
Move One: Plain Words for Enormous Stakes.
The temptation in a big case is to write up to the occasion. Jackson wrote down to the listener, on the theory that the facts were already enormous and the language should get out of their way.
The steal: the bigger the case, the smaller the words. If the injury is real, it does not need your adjectives. Decoration is what a weak fact wears.
Move Two: Build the Sentence They Will Quote.
From Barnette, on forcing schoolchildren to salute a flag: if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, no official, high or petty, gets to prescribe what citizens must believe. Judges have been quoting the fixed star for eighty years, and that is not luck. Jackson built the sentence to travel.
The steal: every brief gets one sentence engineered to be lifted into the opinion. Judges are readers before they are writers. Hand them the line.
Move Three: Write Your Own.
Solicitor General arguments, opinions, Nuremberg: his hand, every time. The reader can always tell when the name on the paper and the hand on the pen belong to different people.
The steal: delegation ends where your signature begins.
A Warning from the Record.
Plain is not casual. Jackson’s simplest sentences were rewritten until they looked effortless, which is the most expensive look there is. Simple is a finish. It is applied last, by hand.
The Drill.
Find the longest sentence in your current draft. Directly after it, write a sentence of five words or fewer. Read the pair aloud. That rhythm costs nothing, and almost nobody at the courthouse uses it.
