Kate Malcolm makes a great point about academic legal writing (and, consequently, about academic writing in general):

Many scholars get away with loads of stuff that makes little to no sense simply because the reader’s [sic] have been conditioned to believe that such incoherence is a sign of higher-level thinking. WRONG. If it doesn’t make sense, it sucks.

A common failing of academic writing in general—and I say this as someone who’s been up to his neck in political science journal articles for the past five years, which often manage to combine the excessive verbosity of a Faulkner novel with the impenetrability of an economics paper—is that people confuse saying a lot with saying something worthwhile. This is particularly pronounced in political science, where the norm seems to call for repeating one’s points ad nauseum in a discipline where journal space is at a premium.

That being said, one of the virtues of the dissertation process is that since you normally have to explain what you’re doing to someone who doesn’t study your discipline (the outside reader) is that the opposite temptation—to assume your reader knows what you know about the discipline as a whole and where your work fits into it—is tempered considerably, which helps in coming up with a coherent explanation of why your research matters (the “rodent sphincter test,” as an ex-colleague colorfully described it).