I was looking through some old articles recently, and I came across a reprint of my first law review article. It was an empirical study of the Chevron doctrine in administrative law, written when I was a law student and published the year after I graduated. My judgment today: interesting ideas, but terrible writing. Take this doozy of a paragraph:

  The large body of literature on the Chevron doctrine draws primarily from three distinct models of how the doctrine functions in practice. Each model presents a jurisprudential paradigm in which a particular set of factors is believed to alter the chances that reviewing courts will uphold agency interpretations of statutory law. Because more than one set of factors can affect the outcomes of Chevron cases, these models are not mutually exclusive: Several might be needed to explain patterns of judicial outcomes accurately. However, despite their ability to function simultaneously, the three paradigms are conceptually very different. This part discusses the three models in detail, focusing on the theoretical assumptions that inform them and the empirical claims that these assumptions produce.

  Why was I saying everything twice? Can I get any wordier? And did I actually write the phrase "jurisprudential paradigm"? Eeks.

  If I could rewrite it today, I think I would replace it with something more like this:

  The Chevron literature offers three descriptive models of what factors influence the outcomes of the Chevron test. This part explores the three models, focusing on their assumptions and the results they predict judges will reach.

Still not great, but better.