Bryan A. Garner

Garner was born on November 17, 1958, in Lubbock, Texas, and grew up Canyon, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts with special honors in its Plan II honors program. He later published excerpts from his senior thesis, notably "Shakespeare's Latinate Neologisms" and "Latin-Saxon Hybrids in Shakespeare and the Bible". He then attended the University of Texas School of Law, where he was an associate editor of the Texas Law Review. He graduated in 1984 with a Juris Doctor.

After graduating from law school, Garner was a law clerk to Judge Thomas M. Reavley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1984 to 1985. He then joined the Dallas law firm of Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal. He later returned to the University of Texas School of Law and was named director of the Texas/Oxford Center for Legal Lexicography. In 1990, he left the university to found LawProse Inc., which provides seminars on clear writing, briefing and editing for lawyers and judges.

Garner has taught at the University of Texas School of Law, the UC Berkeley School of Law, Texas Tech University School of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law and Texas A&M University School of Law. He has been awarded three honorary doctorates from Stetson, La Verne, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He serves on the Board of Advisers of The Green Bag.

As a student at the University of Texas School of Law in 1981, Garner began noticing odd usages in lawbooks, many of them dating back to Shakespeare. They became the source material for his first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (1987). Since 1990, his work has focused on teaching the legal profession clear writing techniques.

In books, articles, and lectures, Garner has tried to reform the way bibliographic references are "interlarded" (interwoven) in the midst of textual analysis. He argues for putting citations in footnotes and notes that in-text information that is important but non-bibliographic. He opposes references such as "457 U.S. 423, 432, 102 S.Ct. 2515, 2521, 89 L.Ed.2d 744, 747" as interruptions in the middle of a line. However, such interruptions in judges' opinions and in lawyers' briefs have remained the norm. Some courts and advocates around the country have begun adopting Garner's recommended style of footnoted citations, and a degree of internal strife has resulted within some organizations. For example, one appellate judge in Louisiana refused to join in a colleague's opinions written in the new format.

Garner says that one of the main reasons for the reform is to make legal writing more comprehensible to readers who lack a legal education. That has attracted opposition, most notably from Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and from his co-author, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Since 1992, Garner has contributed numerous revisions to the field of procedural rules, when he began revising all amendments to the sets of Federal Rules (Civil, Appellate, Evidence, Bankruptcy, and Criminal) for the Judicial Conference of the United States.

Garner and Justice Scalia wrote Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008). Garner maintains a legal consulting practice, focusing on issues in statutory construction and contractual interpretation.

English grammar and usage

Garner's books on English usage include Garner's Modern English Usage. This dictionary was the subject of David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, originally published in the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 2003, Garner contributed a chapter on grammar and usage to the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, and later editions have retained it.

Black's Law Dictionary

In 1995, Garner became the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary. He created a panel of international legal experts to improve the specialized vocabulary in the book. Garner and the panel rewrote and expanded the dictionary's lexicographic information.