Ellen Muehleberger (@emuehleb), Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, posted to Twitter a list of advice for her students about what should go in the conclusion of a scholarly paper in History. Many of her tips seem equally helpful for law review articles, too. Here are a few of Professor Meuhlberger's suggestions:
- take a piece of evidence used early in the paper and revisit it, re-reading it under the new analysis that developed over the course of the paper
- zoom out, taking the reader to a concept or method you haven't talked about yet, but that now needs to be thought of differently because of what you've written, and explain that
- zoom in, looking just at the small field/era/geography you've covered, and make clear where your argument sits among the work of three other people writing on that small field/era/geography
- make a list of the things you weren't able to do in the paper, then turn that list into a set of explorations you suggest are now possible for the reader to take up
The full thread is unrolled here.
I tell my students to avoid putting anything new in the conclusion — the conclusion should be a 1-or 2-paragraph summary of the thesis. Often, when legal writers try to put new material into a conclusion, it is because the analysis in the body of the article is absent or superficial, and they try to make up for it by adding conclusory statements in the conclusion.