On my suggestion, the local library system ordered Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner . . . and I only got around to checking it out now. Hey, I’ve been busy.
This is a compact, readable distillation of advice on legal reasoning, brief writing, and oral argument. I didn’t find anything new in it, but it was a nice refresher, and I think it would be a fine overview for new attorneys.
The other thing of note is when Scalia and Garner disagree, which they do four times, over whether to use contractions in briefs, to put citations in footnotes, to put substantive discussion in footnotes, and to use “he” as a unisex pronoun. The remarkable thing is that I agree with Scalia on the first three (no, no, and yes), and yet his arguments, especially regarding the fourth and in comparison to the rest of the text, are so remarkably cranky that they nearly make me want to change my mind.