Legal Writing Tip #3; Organizing your Arguments

Continuing with the organization theme from last week... legal writers should start their discussion section with their strongest argument. This seems fairly intuitive, but according to critics of legal writing, many bury their strongest arguments among their weaker arguments. Some corollaries to this tip are to put the broadly applicable before the narrowly applicable and the rules before the exceptions to the rules. Steven Stark quotes Justice Ginberg on this point, "Respondents or appellees do well to lead from strength, telling their case affirmitavely, instead of a series of 'not so's' keyed to appellant's presentation and provoking the court to wonder: 'Doth this appellee protest too much?'"