Supreme Court Online
Sarah Ludington: Translating the Court into Plain English
Sarah Ludington ’92 earned a
J.D. and an M.A. in English in Duke’s joint degree program. With her particular love of teaching and writing, she may well have found the perfect job: teaching legal writing to Duke 1Ls and
overseeing the Program in Public Law’s “Supreme Court Online” Web site.
Ludington sees the Web site as integral to the broad educational mission of the Program in Public Law. “The purpose of Supreme Court Online is to put edited versions of groundbreaking Supreme Court opinions into the hands of people who aren’t trained lawyers. We’re specifically trying to make current opinions more accessible to history or political science instructors, journalists, high-school students, or anyone who wants to read a Supreme Court opinion but would struggle with the arcane forms of judicial opinion-writing.” The site provides plain-English summaries of pending cases, links to full-text opinions, and edited versions of certain opinions. It also provides timely commentary from the Duke law faculty on the most significant recent decisions of the Court.
Ludington edits and posts the content of the site. As a former high school English and history teacher, she takes particular satisfaction in the fact that her work reaches beyond the legal community.
“There is a real need to educate people who are not part of the legal community about the law being made by the Supreme Court. If you look at the textbooks used in history or political science courses, the opinions are so drastically edited or ‘dumbed-down’ that an intelligent person who is trying to understand a case is going to be very frustrated. As a high school teacher, I struggled to find versions of opinions that were accessible to my students. We edit the opinions so that a non-lawyer can get a good sense of the language and the decision, but not have to wade through the parts of the opinion, like the citations and the procedural history, that are meaningful only to lawyers. We also try to edit and post the opinions quickly, so that teachers can use them in the classroom within the week that they’re handed down.”
Ludington exhorts her first-year law students to write clearly and welcomes that challenge in her own work on the Web site.
“It’s difficult to summarize complicated legal issues in plain English. But I think it’s an admirable goal for lawyers, who are always criticized for using jargon and impenetrable language, to write as clearly as possible.”
With a particular interest in First Amendment and privacy law, Ludington uses her work on the Web site to stay current with those issues. She has proposed teaching an upper-class seminar on information privacy law and hopes to offer it next year, in addition to her legal writing class.
Ludington was a stellar law student; she was a note editor on the Duke Law Journal and won awards for writing and constitutional law. Following graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then for the Honorable Joyce Hens Green, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“The highlight of my clerkships was realizing how much integrity the judges have and how incredibly hard they work. I also loved being on the deciding side of the process, as opposed to the litigating side.”
A Washington, D.C. native, Ludington first came to the Triangle as a law student and moved back with her family (which now includes three young boys) after practicing for a few years in Washington and New York. She taught English in a local high school for several years before applying for the legal writing job.
“It’s the ideal job for me because I’m using all of my post-graduate training. I get to teach writing, practice my own writing, and develop my understanding of the legal issues that interest me the most.”