About this campaign

Every year, thousands of law students are diagnosed with Word Count Restraint Syndrome — a devastating condition in which the afflicted student is constitutionally incapable of writing a memo, brief, or exam answer within the assigned page limit.

Symptoms include:

Compulsive footnoting (up to 200 per page) · Inability to use a period without appending a dependent clause · Reflexive citation of law review articles published between 1887 and 1904 · Spontaneous Latin · Restatement parentheticals inserted into casual conversation · Accidentally writing a 12-page text message · Beginning every sentence with “It is well-established that…”

The science

Researchers at the Institute for Prolific Legal Scholarship (not accredited) have identified WCRS as a bio-psycho-socio-legal phenomenon arising from overexposure to casebooks, legal writing professors who use the phrase “thorough analysis,” and grading rubrics that award points for “comprehensiveness.” Peer-reviewed*

*Reviewed by three peers who also have WCRS and made the abstract 6,000 words long.

Where your money goes

Funds will cover: therapy (specifically, a licensed professional who can say “stop writing” in a legally binding way) · Printer ink · Wrist braces from excessive Westlaw scrolling · A graduate student to read the footnotes · Emergency Bluebook consultations · Post-traumatic stress counseling for TAs who received 80-page “short answer” exams

The case for giving

As the court held in Generosity v. Stinginess, 404 U.S. 1 (1971) (fictional), the duty to assist those in verbose distress is not merely moral but arguably quasi-contractual, subject to promissory estoppel if you’ve read this far. We argue, in the alternative, that your donation is both (1) the right thing to do, and (2) tax-deductible, notwithstanding the fact that we checked neither of those things.