Prof. Michael Madison’s review of Academic Legal Writing: It’s out now in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review, and available here. It’s a law review essay that goes quite a bit beyond just describing, evaluating, and critiquing the book; it also compares it to Elizabeth Fajans’ & Mary Falk’s Scholarly Writing for Law Students: Seminar Papers, Law Review Notes and Law Review Competition Papers (which it rightly praises), and makes some excellent points about, among other things, the role of legal scholarship in legal education. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Law professors love to talk about themselves. Rarely is this more evident than when they have a student audience. It is surprising, therefore, that only now has a full-time legal scholar, dedicated primarily to matters other than the topic of writing itself, produced an entire book of advice for the student scholar. In Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers, Eugene Volokh, who teaches the law of the First Amendment, copyright law, and firearms regulation policy at the UCLA School of Law, has delivered an engaging, witty, and extremely useful book for the aspiring student note and article writer that is based, it clearly appears, on the model of scholarship that Volokh himself has so successfully pursued.

The review is much worth reading, even when it doesn’t praise the book as much!