Designed for upper-level survey legal drafting courses, this groundbreaking text explains drafting using a common vocabulary that applies to any legal document based on a fundamental rule structure, including statutes and other forms of public drafting as well as contracts and other forms of private drafting. This unified drafting approach gives students a common denominator approach to drafting all kinds of legal documents. In addition, students can use the techniques they’ve learned to deconstruct, interpret, and revise any kind of legal document composed of rules. This common-sense approach of teaching/learning a single vocabulary and set of skills to use in drafting any rules-based legal document is an innovative model for U.S. legal drafting courses, though it has been used in other countries for decades. Key Features: A unified approach that teaches students the general skills of drafting rules of law—duties, discretionary authority, and declarations, including their conditions in legal tests. Practice applying those skills to drafting a range of documents, including contracts, statutes, regulations, and other. Coverage of how courts interpret the rules and how to draft anticipating what the courts will do. An understanding of how law governs human behavior through the rules that students learn to draft. A wide range of classroom exercises on the detail of drafting. Additional drafting assignments, for use in and out of class, that help students learn how to use the rules and to accomplish clients’ goals.

"The second edition of Legal Writing by Design remains unique in demonstrating how to transform thoughts into writing by explaining the link between thinking and writing. It doesn't just tell the reader to 'argue by analogy' or to 'apply the rule' - it explains the design of the thinking involved in those processes and shows how to transform that design into writing"--Unedited summary from book cover.

"This update of Howard Darmstadter's witty, accessible guide to legal drafting reminds practitioners how best to choose their words, to compose clear and succinct sentences, to lay out their documents, and to decide which documents best serve a given scenario. This book may be unconventional, but it is a vital element of any lawyer's library."--BOOK JACKET.

Edited by Victor Thuronyi, this book offers an introduction to a broad range of issues in comparative tax law and is based on comparative discussion of the tax laws of developed countries. It presents practical models and guidelines for drafting tax legislation that can be used by officials of developing and transition countries. Volume I covers general issues, some special topics, and major taxes other than income tax.

Although the details of tax law are literally endless—differing not only from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but also from day-to-day—structures and patterns exist across tax systems that can be understood with relative ease. This book, now in an updated new edition, focuses on these essential patterns. It provides an immensely useful introduction to the core common knowledge that any well-informed tax lawyer or policy maker should have about comparative tax law in our times. The busy reader will welcome the compact nature of this work, which is shorter than the first edition and can be read in a weekend if one skips footnotes. The authors elucidate the commonalities and differences across countries in areas including (much of the detail new to the second edition): • general anti-avoidance rules; • court decisions striking down tax laws as violating constitutional rules against retroactivity, unequal treatment of equals, confiscation, and undue vagueness; • statutory interpretation; • inflation adjustment rules and the allowance for corporate equity; • value added tax systems; • concepts such as “tax”, “capital gain”, “tax avoidance”, and “partnership”; • corporate-shareholder tax systems; • the relationship between tax and financial accounting; • taxation of investment income; • tax authorities’ ability to obtain and process information about taxpayers; and • systems of appeals from tax assessments. The information and analysis pull together valuable material which is scattered over a disparate literature, much of it not available in English. Especially considering the dynamic nature of tax law, whose rate of change exceeds that of any other field of law, the authors’ clear identification of the underlying patterns and fundamental structures that all tax systems have in common—as well as where the differences lie—guides the reader and offers resources for further research.

From a corporate lawyer in private practice comes a detailed analysis of, and guide to, the conventions of language and structure in drafting corporate agreements. Adams summarizes the traditional techniques of drafting and proposes alternatives that produce clearer, more efficient contracts. This comprehensive and pragmatic book includes examples of different usages and explains in detail the reasons for favoring one over another. Citing other authorities on drafting, legal writing, and English usage and grammar generally, as well as case law, Adams creates an authoritative context for his own arguments and advice. An appendix provides before and after versions of a sample contract identifying inefficient or archaic usages and proposing alternatives. This essential resource examines the parts of a contract and the drafting issues found in each. Adams pays particular attention to the categories of language that occur in the body of the contract and how best to express them. He then addresses more general topics, including use of defined terms and references to time, and discusses various usage that tend to be problematic, such as provisos. Adams also discusses provisions that specify drafting conventions, examines the principles of effective general writing that apply to drafting, and considers aspects of the drafting process. Ideal for anyone who drafts, negotiates, or interprets corporate agreements, this work will find a place in the libraries and on the desks of practicing lawyers and law students alike.

What is effective legislation? Is it a matter of intuition, luck or the result of evidence based law making? Can it be consciously ‘engineered’? This book advances the novel idea that legislative effectiveness is the result of complex ‘mechanics’ in the conceptualisation, design and drafting of four elements inherent in every law: purpose, content, context and results. It concludes that effectiveness can be achieved with conceptual and methodological insights that guide the specific choices of lawmakers when designing and drafting legislation.