Legal register (legal)

What this skill carries — grep references/ for any subject the names below miss: !d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"

The base is writing-general, and it is assumed loaded alongside this file. Everything below is what is additional for law review prose. Nothing from the base is restated here.

You are drafting and revising law review prose: a flagship article, a student note, a seminar paper, a piece of legal scholarship carrying footnotes. Voice, citation form and register follow the conventions below.

Everything here is measured, not asserted. The source is a control corpus of 6,563 pre-2020 articles / 5,560,816 sentences from all 14 T14 flagship law reviews plus four business-law journals (/data/eh2889/aitic_corpus_law on rjds), contrasted against 8,733,332 sentences of finance/accounting scholarship. Percentages are share of sentences containing the feature, law corpus first. Rates written n/M are hits per million sentences.

Register: what actually distinguishes this corpus

feature	law	finance	do
we	0.87%	7.75%	Avoid the authorial we. It is nine times rarer here. Prefer the impersonal construction or This Article.
we find / show / document	0.02%	0.58%	Effectively absent — 29× rarer. Never open a claim this way. Say what is true, then cite.
supra / infra / id.	1.91%	0.00%	Bluebook short forms are the norm and appear in roughly one sentence in fifty.
quotation marks	8.36%	1.68%	Quote sources directly and often — five times the rate of the finance register.
court / holding / held / statute / doctrine	6.41%	0.73%	The vocabulary of authority is the substance, not decoration.
semicolons	4.33%	2.27%	Twice the finance rate. Long coordinate structures are idiomatic here.
may / might	3.56%	1.99%	Hedging is register-appropriate. Do not strip it out to sound decisive.
Part I / Part II	0.20%	0.00%	Cross-reference by Part, never by "Section 2".
This Article	0.06%	0.00%	The self-reference. Capital A. This Note for student work.
This paper	0.02%	0.28%	Wrong register. Do not write it.
parentheticals	1.93%	4.73%	Less parenthetical throat-clearing than the finance register; put the qualification in a footnote.
regression / coefficient	0.05%	2.25%	Empirical vocabulary is 45× rarer here. If the Article is empirical, it still narrates rather than tabulates.

Conventions

• Footnotes carry the citations. Substantive text goes in the body; support, parentheticals and qualifications go below the line. Never inline a full citation in body prose.
• Cross-reference by Part (Part II.B), not section number.
• Signals matter: see, see also, cf., but see, e.g. — italicized, and each means something different. Do not use see where the source states the proposition directly.
• supra / infra / id. for short forms once a source is established.
• Small caps for journal names in citations.
• Three body Parts is the default — Background, the Argument with counterarguments folded in, the Prescription. Splitting into four or five Parts is an exception you reach, not a starting point.

Volokh, run through the law corpus

The source guide is Volokh's Academic Legal Writing, distilled in full at ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/writing/references/volokh-distilled.md — read it there for the full text of any rule below. Where this file and that guide disagree, this file controls. Volokh's prescriptions were checked against the same corpora and sorted three ways.

Ship

rule	why it holds
Never open with This article discusses…	It is throat-clearing, and the corpus opens with the concrete problem. Hook with the question or the controversy.
Confront counterarguments in the Part that makes the claim	Deferring them to a separate Part reads as evasion and forces the reader to hold the objection unanswered.
Read the original source	A case cited from a headnote, a treatise, or training data is an unverified claim presented as fact. Even Supreme Court opinions misstate precedents.
Synthesize precedents; do not summarize case by case	Courts generally hold X, except when Y — not a sequential digest.
Be precise with terms	murder ≠ homicide ≠ killing; foreign-born ≠ noncitizen; children is ambiguous until you give the age range.
Understate criticism	mistaken, not idiotic. Overstating raises your own burden of proof.
Unpack the metaphor	slippery slope and chilling effect hide the argument rather than making it. Name the mechanism.

Advisory

rule	measured reality	what to actually do
Cut the hedges (may, might, arguably)	may/might in 3.56% of law sentences, 1.8× the finance rate	Hedging is register-appropriate here. Cut arguably where it substitutes for the argument; leave the rest.
Prefer active voice	passive 7.91% law vs 8.55% finance — not a register marker	Ask who acted. Do not convert on principle.
Avoid long coordinate sentences	semicolons 4.33%, twice the finance rate	Long coordinate structures are idiomatic in this corpus. Break the ones that lose the reader, not the ones that are merely long.

Dropped

rule	why it is dropped
Avoid pursuant to	837/M in the law corpus — 26× the finance rate. This is not legalese to be purged; it is the legal register. Flagging it teaches the drafter to write like an economist.
Avoid the passive throughout	See above. The measurement refutes the rule as a register claim.

Vindicated in this corpus specifically

Beyond the shared list in writing-general: To be sure, runs 194.0/M here (against 11.5/M in finance) and Admittedly, 63.3/M. cuts against (13.1/M) and cuts the other way are standard analytical vocabulary. A reviewer who flags any of these as an AI tell is wrong, and the corpus says so.