For examples of powerfully written prose, attorneys should read and study the publications of the Dean of Berkeley Law, in particular, “No Democracy Lasts Forever.”
If you want to improve your legal writing, you should constantly read examples of high-quality prose and study it for technique and structure.
Legal writing expert Bryan Garner, for example, urges attorneys to regularly and closely read publications like Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic to internalize top-notch professional, nonfiction syntax and develop an “inner ear” for it.
Garner also recommends reading superb examples of fiction-writing to get a sense of how to build a compelling narrative and elicit sympathy for protagonists. Being an effective advocate turns in no small part on an ability to tell a convincing tale, he says.
You also would do well to make a habit of reading the work of lawyers who wield words with unusual mastery and are thus highly effective at the art of persuasion. One lawyer whose writing particularly stands out is acclaimed constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (or “Berkeley Law”) who frequently argues appellate cases and has done so several times in the United States Supreme Court. He has authored more than 200 law review articles and contributes regularly to publications such as the ABA Journal, The Sacramento Bee, and the Los Angeles Daily Journal.
The prolific Chemerinsky has also penned 20 books. His most recent, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, is particularly evocative, though sobering in its subject matter. It is also a shining example of powerfully written prose. Lawyers wishing to improve their writing would do well not just to read it, but to study it carefully. Although it was published in August 2024, it is highly relevant right now given its extensive treatment of two issues that threaten to undermine the fairness of the November 2026 midterm elections: voter disenfranchisement, in the form of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the rise of partisan gerrymandering, where the party in control of the state legislature is able to skew the voting districts in its favor. Both issues have significantly undermined the democratic process and have contributed to the public’s historically unprecedented lack of trust in our government, according to Chemerinsky. (Chemerinsky, however, did support last year’s Proposition 50, known as the “Election Rigging Response Act,” which allowed the Democratic-controlled California legislature to temporarily engage in partisan gerrymandering to try to compensate for the Texas legislature’s gerrymandering in favor of the Republican Party. As he told the Bar Association of San Francisco at the BASF’s and other organizations’ “Constitution Day” presentation in September 2025, “You want to stick to your principles, but sometimes the consequences are too dire to do so.”)
Chemerinsky does not write like far too many lawyers do. In No Democracy, he primarily uses the active voice. His sentences are crisp and uncluttered, free from multiple dependent clauses and unnecessary words. One sentence flows from another, and the transitions between paragraphs appear seamless.
In the prologue, he goes straight to presenting his basic premise, as you should, too, in any brief written for the court or any memorandum intended for clients or other attorneys:
Our reverence [for the Constitution] has kept us from seeing how much it has become the root of the problem… This reverence [] comes at a great cost. For too long, we have ignored or accepted the Constitution’s serious flaws. In many ways, the government that it has given us is not functioning and has lost the confidence of a huge swath of the American people. The Constitution has played a role in creating a society that is flagrantly unequal, especially along the lines of race and class. Its very existence as a largely unchanged guiding document has become a sledgehammer wielded by a minority to prop up a system that engenders polarization and festering national discord.
Part One, “The Crisis Facing American Democracy,” serves as a summary of argument. In it, Chemerinsky makes clear that he is focusing on three choices that the framers made in 1787 that have increasingly come to haunt us by giving some votes more impact than others and concentrating too much power in the hands of a few:
(1) the use of the Electoral College to select the president of the nation
The idea of establishing the Electoral College emerged, Chemerinsky explains, in part to increase the political strength of slave-holding states. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention already had decided that each enslaved individual should count as three-fifths of a person in determining the number of seats a state would have in the United States House of Representatives, where each state’s number of members would be determined by its population. Because the Electoral College allots each state a number of electors equal to the number of its representatives and senators, the slave-holding states would have a greater political advantage in choosing the president. Chemerinsky has said that this helps explain why most of the presidents in the early part of American history came from the South. Because of changes in demographics, specifically, in the disproportionately larger population increases in urban areas, today, theoretically, states that are home to less than one-quarter of the country’s population can choose the president, he points out. That is why a vote for president cast in say, Wyoming, carries significantly more weight than one cast in California. Twice in the past 26 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016) won the election anyway because of the Electoral College. This method of determining the president is an affront to democracy that, as Chemerinsky notes, political scientists have determined is increasingly likely to happen again. That most states have legislated that the candidate who garners the highest number of popular votes in the state takes all the state’s electors worsens the problem, he writes.
(2) the allocation of two senators per state
That each state has the same number of United States senators reflects a compromise to appease the states with smaller populations, who wanted equal representation in the legislature with higher population states, Chemerinsky explains. Just as changes in demographics have given votes from more sparsely-populated states greater impact on the outcome of presidential races than votes from more highly-populated states, these changes have given votes from lesser-populated states greater influence in determining decisions in the United States Senate. Moreover, since each state’s number of electors matches its number of members in the United States House of Representatives, combined with its number of members in the U.S. Senate, the decision to allot each state the same number of senators regardless of its population increased the lop-sided nature of the Electoral College. The allotment of two senators per state is the antithesis of democracy, he argues, where individuals should have equal representation and equal opportunity to influence decisions made on behalf of the public. To illustrate his point, he notes that during the first two years of the Biden presidency, the 50 senators aligned with the Democratic Party represented 42 million more people than the 50 senators from the Republican Party. As Chemerinsky remarked in an on-line discussion of No Democracy presented in 2025 by the Berkeley Law Alumni Association, “There’s no way to reconcile that with democracy.”
(3) the decision to provide life tenure to United States Supreme Court justices
The aim of appointing U.S. Supreme Court justices for the duration of their “good behavior” (effectively, for their lifetimes unless impeached and convicted) was to protect them from political influence and retaliation. Given that the average lifespan in 1787 was only 38 years, the framers, however, could not have envisioned that these days, members of the U.S. Supreme Court commonly spend decades on the bench, Chemerinsky points out. This problem has resulted in the concentration of far too much power in the hands of just a few individuals, he writes. Moreover, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in recent decades have greatly undermined democracy, he argues. For example, in addition to the Court’s decimation of the Voting Rights Act and refusal to restrict partisan gerrymandering, its 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has allowed corporations to spend unchecked sums to help elect or defeat candidates for national office. Chemerinsky writes,
[T]he Supreme Court has become involved in the political process to an unprecedented extent and in a manner inimical to democracy. It has struck down campaign finance laws and allowed corporations and the rich to dominate the political process…Ever since [Citizens United], huge amounts of money have been spent in elections, often “dark money” whose source is never known. And often these expenditures are decisive in determining who is elected. The Court thereby gave the wealthy and the powerful, who always have an advantage in the political process, vastly more influence and control.
In Part II, Chemerinsky expands on the points he presents in Part I. Divided into decades starting with the 1960s, Part II is an excellent example of an expertly, seemingly effortlessly constructed narrative. As has been pointed out in the column, a narrative is the form that you should present the facts in the Statement of Facts sections of your briefs. In this section consisting of just 108 pages that covers historical, political, and legal developments over the past 60-some years and also explains how the problematic decisions Chemerinsky identifies that were made by the nation’s founders came to be, he deftly distills a vast amount of material and exhibits what could very well be an unmatched command of the salient facts. Look to it as an example of what you can aspire to achieve in your own writing.
Part III consists of a highly organized discussion of possible solutions to the problems Chemerinsky sets forth and explains earlier in the book. These include remedies that do not require the difficult enterprise of amending the U.S. Constitution, nor the writing of a new one, perhaps an even greater challenge, which, because of the way the Constitution is crafted, is the only solution to the allotment of two senators per state. For example, he points out that Congress could increase the number of U.S. House of Representatives, which has not happened since the 1920s. That change could help compensate for the anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, he writes. Congress could also impose prospective term limits on seats in the U.S. Supreme Court, an idea that he explains has bipartisan and “overwhelming” public support.
Chemerinsky also argues that, for the sake of making the country more democratic, we should start thinking about crafting and adopting a new constitution. And he lays out a method for how that could be achieved, including ratification by popular vote. Some aspects of our current Constitution should be preserved, he writes, such as the separation of powers and an enumeration of individual rights, which, he believes, should be expanded.
By the end of the book, readers will be hard pressed not to agree with his assertions, or at least his basic premise. While some may criticize the work for its repetition of certain issues, as anyone knows who has taken his bar review course on constitutional law, Chemerinsky presents and reiterates his points so effectively that you cannot help but remember those that are the most important. His treatise on constitutional law is the most widely used in American law schools because of its high level of accessibility. As Bryan Garner points out, accessibility is the essence of good writing:
Good writing welcomes readers in. Its meaning is available on first reading because its sentences proceed in a logical order, its words carry their ordinary and intended sense, and its structure helps readers see where they are going.
For excellent examples of stellar writing, lawyers should look to the work of Erwin Chemerinsky, in particular, No Democracy Lasts Forever.
Attorney Savannah Blackwell is a former news reporter who covered government and politics for nearly 15 years, mostly in San Francisco. She can be reached at savannah.blackwell@gmail.