Once upon a time: storytelling in Learning Resources v. Trump

Every fall, with each new class of 1Ls, we legal writing teachers undertake a strange job. We spend an entire year trying to get students to not write like lawyers, a notoriously dreadful category of writers. In pursuit of that goal, we often target the bad qualities like jargon, legalese, word-wasting phrases, and other legal idiosyncrasies. But I think we’d get better results if we started with what makes any writing “good” – whether it is written by lawyers or by actual humans. As evidence, I would point to the Supreme Court’s best writers, who deploy tactics often taught (and missed) in a good English composition class. Take Chief Justice John Roberts as an example. Flash back to November 2025: if you’re Roberts, you’ve got a problem – or at least a challenge. You’ve just assigned yourself the majority opinion in Learning Resources v. Trump. Now you must convince readers inside and outside the court that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act provides no authority for the one policy most important to this president: tariffs. Never mind that the solicitor general has warned that your decision will provoke another Great Depression. Never mind that the outcome depends upon Talmudic esoterica unfamiliar to a politicized public – things like separation of powers, textualism, and the major questions doctrine. Beyond all that, you must communicate dreadful source material, especially to non-legal readers. Those readers must learn something of IEEPA itself, which clocks in at around 2,000 words of abstract text. Then, they need the content of the president’s orders, which add almost 12,000 words, even without the appendices. So … what do you do? Roberts solves this problem by meeting the expectations of the ordinary, English-language reader. Apart from citations, he tells a 422-word story, and he does it with a tactic any writer can emulate: He uses actors as the subjects of most of his sentences. In a conflict over presidential power, Roberts makes the president the main character in a story, both in setting out IEEPA’s requirements and in summarizing the president’s orders. After an initial topic sentence about IEEPA, he puts the president – rather than the statute – in the subject position. He writes that, to satisfy IEEPA, “the President must identify” a threat. Then, “he must declare” an emergency. Then “he” may “regulate [. . . 16 words later . . .] importation.” Turning to the facts, the chief keeps the president – rather than his orders – in the spotlight. He practically ties the president to a chair at center stage. In the narrative, “President Trump sought” to address two, specific threats (“The first was the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China,” and “[t]he second was ‘large and persistent’ trade deficits.”). Roberts writes that the “President determined” the threats were serious. “He invoked” his power under IEEPA. As required by the statute, “President Trump declared” the requisite emergency. “He then imposed” tariffs, which “the President” later changed when “he increased” or “he removed” tariffs. Later, “the President . . . shifted . . . goods into and out of” the tariff regime. Indeed, in all the sentences he wrote for Section I.A of the opinion, the chief used an actor as the subject in all but five. In making that choice, the chief is not employing some tactic unique to “legal” writing, separate from ordinary English prose. Your old English composition teacher has long known the power of storytelling language. One such teacher, Joseph Willams, changed the way I wrote as a lawyer, and I love the way he put it. In the book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, he focuses on what every reader needs from a writer. While readers look for action in the verbs, “they want characters as subjects even more.” You erect tripping hazards for your reader when, “for no good reason,” you “fail to name characters in subjects, or worse, delete them entirely.” Unfortunately, most lawyers don’t write this way. Most lawyers – even great ones – write more like the Congressional Research Service. In its September 2025 report on IEEPA, CRS covers essentially the same ground as the chief’s 422-word story. But instead of a story, CRS offers up a report filled with tripping hazards. It force-feeds the reader five dense pages (10–14) of abstract prose, replete with footnotes. Where Roberts describes IEEPA by focusing on the president, CRS hangs a 56-word sentence on “IEEPA empowers.” Readers must then swallow a 50-word sentence hung on “statute provides.” And the public is reminded that each “new threat . . . requires” certain actions by the president. The coup de grace? CRS treats readers to a dreadful block quote of IEEPA’s central provisions. To be sure, the president does appear in the paragraphs discussing the tariff orders. But if Roberts ties the president to a chair, CRS permits him to wander on and off stage. In the president’s absence, readers must content themselves with massive sentences about the “January Proclamation” or the “February Executive Orders.” Again, rather than a story, the reader must shoulder a bureaucratic tome – scrupulously accurate, no doubt, but abstract enough and long enough to avoid being read at all. The chief, in contrast, uses storytelling both to be read and to be understood, all while setting up his version of the question. Remember the story: The president issued barely related tariffs that swallowed the entire economy, then he changed them at random. But Congress wrote, “regulate . . . [yadda, yadda, yadda] . . . importation.” Based on this language, can a president really set tariffs “on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time”? Nope. So, how to write like the chief rather than like a lawyer? Prefer actors as subjects rather than concepts or abstractions like proclamations, orders, tariffs, separation of powers, or the major questions doctrine. Of course, “prefer” means you’ll occasionally discover “good reason” to abandon this approach, but not nearly as often as you think. For the moment, create drafts like you always do, then build in storytelling when you line edit. Use this process (adapted from Joseph Williams): - Underline the first seven or eight words of each sentence. - Do you see a subject there? Is it a character? - If it’s not a character, is there some “good reason” to choose the abstraction? - If not, look for characters hidden in other parts of speech like “the president’s orders” or “the powers of the president.” - If necessary, create a menu of the main characters in your conflict, then invite them back onstage as subjects who have things to do. In the end, good legal writers do the same things as good writers in any field. Good writers tell stories where characters do things. And here, the president was doing things, but without a permission slip from congress. Recommended Citation: Kendall Gray, Once upon a time: storytelling in Learning Resources v. Trump, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 13, 2026, 10:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/once-upon-a-time-storytelling-in-learning-resources-v-trump/