Legal Drafting in a Nutshell

Legal Drafting in a Nutshell, 3d edition, provides guidance on producing transactional documents, contracts, instruments, legislation, and regulations that solve existing problems and prevent future problems. The book provides both a large scale, macro overview of the drafting process as well as small scale, micro focused discussion of the mechanics of legal documents at the sentence, word, and punctuation level. The third edition has been extensively revised to include focused, concrete discussion of ambiguity, vagueness, definitions, representations, warranties, covenants, conditions, document formatting, and drafting ethics. Legal drafting is as much a thought process as a writing process; clear thinking leads to clear drafting. This book is a guide for clear, structured thinking about drafting in order to provide readers with a structured process to follow when assembling useful legal documents. Its authors bring a unique combination of theory and practice experience to the subject: Professor Haggard has taught, among other things, contracts, employment law, and legal drafting since the mid-1960s at The University of South Carolina, Professor Kuney practiced full time in California for over ten years before joining The University of Tennessee College of Law to head a program that is designed to integrate substantive business law courses with skills training for the budding transactional lawyer or commercial litigator. Together they provide a well rounded, multi-perspective, complete guide to the preparation of working legal documents that is useful to the student or practitioner as a primer, a text, or a reference.