Marc Grinker (1956–96), award-winning law professor and teacher, created this widely used grammar and punctuation guide in the early 1990s for students at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Before joining the Chicago-Kent faculty in 1990, Marc had practiced with the law firm Davis, Polk and Wardwell in New York City and taught at Hofstra University School of Law in Hempstead, Long Island. At Chicago-Kent, he served as the inaugural director of the Appellate Advocacy Program, which won local, regional and national individual and interscholastic honours under his leadership. Marc died of AIDS in 1996. The law school honours his memory through the annual Grinker Award for students who embody his dedication to the program and to the law school.
Marc’s legacy also lives on through this legal writing guide. When it disappeared from the Chicago-Kent website, its clear explanations and examples of legal usage were missed by those teaching law students, lawyers, and judges alike. It has now been reproduced, updated, and preserved at the University of Victoria thanks to the Faculty of Humanities Computing and Media Centre and by kind permission of Marc’s father and sister, Charlie and Lori Grinker.
Marc A. Grinker, Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Ilana Diamond Rovner Program in Appellate Advocacy, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology.
I would like to thank Professors Suzanne Ehrenberg and Molly Warner Lien for their support of this project. I am especially indebted to Professor Susan Adams for her careful reading and editing of an earlier draft. Her suggestions have made this a better learning and teaching tool. Rosemary Shiels, Director of the Chicago-Kent College of Law Center for Law and Computers, and Jeff Harrison, a second-year law student working for the Center, provided invaluable support in creating and programming the computer-software version of this guide. I am also grateful to Dominick Grillo, Manager of Chicago-Kent's Electronic Publishing and Computer Resources Group, for his important contributions in the editing and testing of this program.