Golden Pen Award

Purpose of the Award

The Institute has created an Outreach Committee to raise the Institute’s profile and to improve the quality of legal writing throughout the legal profession. As part of that effort, the Committee has created a Golden Pen Award to recognize persons who have significantly advanced the cause of better legal writing.

Procedures for the Award

Possible Recipients: Anyone who has made an extraordinary contribution to the cause of better legal writing. The contribution may take any form, such as promoting the use of clear language in public documents, outstanding scholarship or journalism about legal writing, exceptional writing in law practice, improving the quality of legal-writing instruction, or advocating for better writing within the legal community. Normally, the award will be given to someone who is not an active member of the Legal Writing Institute, but an active member may be considered in exceptional circumstances.
Timing of the Award: Ideally, once a year at the annual meeting of the AALS. Alternatively, at the Institute’s summer conference or at any other place that the Board of Directors approves.
Number of Persons Who Could Receive the Award Each Year: No strict limits. For instance, several persons might be responsible for a specific project. As a rule, though, we would probably not recognize more than two persons or projects a year.
Procedure for Identifying and Choosing Recipients: Any member of the Institute may nominate someone. The Outreach Committee will call for nominations through The Second Draft and by electronic means. The committee will send a nomination or nominations to the Board of Directors before July 1 of each year. The committee will try to operate by consensus, but a majority vote is enough to approve a nomination. If multiple nominations are approved for a given year, the committee will recommend them in order of preference. The Board may reject all nominees.

The 2011 Award

The 2011 Golden Pen Award has been given to George Gopen, a Professor of English at Duke University. Prof. Gopen was one of the first to recognize the need for professionalization of the legal writing academy, and he has worked tirelessly throughout his career to urge law schools to improve the status of legal writing professors. He was the first to suggest an annual survey of legal writing programs to measure our progress over the years. His ground-breaking work on the Reader Expectation Approach to legal writing was one of the earliest attempts to put a theoretical framework to legal writing, and he wrote one of the first textbooks devoted to the teaching of legal writing.

Past Award Winners

The 2010 Award

The LWI Board voted to award the 2010 Golden Pen Award to William C. Burton, Esquire. Mr. Burton received the Golden Pen for all of many notable accomplishments including his very well-respected legal thesaurus, but mostly because he has become one of the most listened-to and melodic voices in the world of people who advocates for legal writing excellence. He created the Burton Foundation, a volunteer, not-for-profit, academic organization that concentrates on the relevance and importance of modernized legal writing. His foundation rewards and celebrates legal writing instruction and action. You may read more about the foundation and the awards at http://www.burtonawards.com/about.html . The award ceremony took place at the LWI Biennial Conference in June 2010.

The 2009 Award

LWI presented its ninth Golden Pen award to the Naitonal Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) to honor their work helping attorneys general to deliver high quality legal writing in their briefs. Dan Schweitzer, the project counsel for NAAG's Supreme Court Project, accepted the award on behalf of NAAG.

The 2008 Award

The Legal Writing Institute presented its eighth Golden Pen Award to Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert, Senior Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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