Jill Barton, director of the Legal Communication and Research Skills (LComm) Program and professor of legal writing, will have her most recent book, The Supreme Guide to Writing, published by Oxford University Press in September 2024.
The guidebook is based on the first-ever study of every signed majority opinion, concurrence, and dissent over a five-year period - 10,000 pages of U.S. Supreme Court opinions - to describe best practices in writing today. It also samples some of the Supreme Court justices' most brilliant sentences from the past three years.
Barton is a former appellate judicial clerk and an award-winning journalist. In addition to her recent book, she also has authored So Ordered: The Writer’s Guide for Aspiring Judges, Judicial Clerks, and Interns (Wolters Kluwer 2017), and coauthored The Handbook for the New Legal Writer (Aspen 2023), a popular law school textbook now in its third edition, that aims to demystify the process of legal writing and inspire beginning and experienced legal writers.
Barton earned her Bachelor of Journalism magna cum laude from the University of Missouri and then worked as a journalist for more than a decade, mostly for the Associated Press and other news organizations in Florida. Barton later received her M.S. in journalism from the University of Kansas, where she taught advanced reporting, and her J.D. summa cum laude from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In law school, she received the West Publishing Award for Outstanding Scholarly Accomplishment and won the National Association of Women Lawyers student writing competition.
