Culture To Culture: A Guide To U.S. Legal Writing

Culture to Culture is a text for lawyers from other countries. Taking a contrastive approach, the text explains the U.S. legal system's rhetorical preferences, linguistic specializations, and current conventions. Readers will be able to learn comfortably and quickly what U.S. audiences expect. Careful not to judge the quality of this or other systems, the text describes how U.S. lawyers analyze problems and explain solutions. By studying this contrastive text, international lawyers can perform well as researchers and writers no matter what the context: law school or law practice in the U.S. For those studying in or returning to their own countries, the text opens a comparative analytical window on how U.S. lawyers research, analyze, negotiate, and write. These comparisons offer students tools for reading U.S. texts, analyzing U.S. problems with a special emphasis on issue formulation, researching U.S. sources, organizing U.S. analytical patterns, and writing in acceptable U.S. legal styles. The book also introduces current conventions through U.S. legal texts, including letters, memos, transactional documents, briefs, exams, and scholarly papers. Indispensable to foreign students studying U.S. law, the text covers a broad range of topics and questions studied by author Jill Ramsfield, who has worked with international lawyers for nearly two decades.