Jill Barton

Jill Barton is a professor of legal writing and the director of the Legal Communication and Research Skills (LComm) Program at the University of Miami School of Law, where she has taught for more than 15 years. A former appellate judicial clerk and award-winning journalist, she is the author of “The Supreme Guide to Writing” (Oxford University Press, 2024), a five-year study of how U.S. Supreme Court justices write.

Before law, Barton spent more than a decade as a reporter, mostly for The Associated Press and other news organizations in Florida, and earned journalism awards from The Associated Press, Scripps Howard and The New York Times Co. She holds a Bachelor of Journalism, magna cum laude, from the University of Missouri and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, where she taught advanced reporting. She earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, where she received the West Publishing Award for Outstanding Scholarly Accomplishment and won the National Association of Women Lawyers student writing competition. She began her legal career as an appellate judicial clerk.

“The Supreme Guide to Writing” draws on more than 10,000 pages of Supreme Court opinions and finds that the court has adopted a more casual, approachable style over the past decade. Barton also wrote “So Ordered: The Writer’s Guide for Aspiring Judges, Judicial Clerks, and Interns” (Wolters Kluwer, 2017) and co-authored “The Handbook for the New Legal Writer” with Rachel H. Smith, a law school textbook now in its third edition, with a fourth edition addressing artificial intelligence in legal practice on the way.

Barton leads writing workshops for law firms nationwide, trains lawyers and judges, and presents at national conferences. In 2026, she was appointed to the board of directors of Scribes — The American Society of Legal Writers. She also created SupremeGrammar.com, an interactive platform for practicing writing skills.