Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates
Typography for Lawyers
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Category Archives: Design
Random thought: double spacing
“[Administrative Law] Judges should avoid double-spacing their decisions. Double-spacing gives decisions a draft-like appearance and makes them unnecessarily long. Using smaller line-space increments (1.1 or 1.2) creates an open, easier to read, appearance.”
Michael H. Frost & Paul A. Bateman, Writing Deskbook for Administrative Judges: An Introduction 66 (Carolina Academic Press 2010).
Ideas to reduce paper would make briefs more readable, too.
In her recent article, Conserving the Canvas, Professor Ruth Anne Robbins makes the following recommendations aimed at reducing paper use in legal briefs. The recommendations are equally appropriate for improving the readability of legal briefs:
- allow and encourage or even require double-sided printing;
- move to 1.5 line spacing rather than double spacing; and
- adopt court rules that limit documents by word counts while simultaneously eliminating font and font-size requirements.
Ruth Anne Robbins, Conserving the Canvas: Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Legal Briefs by Re-imagining Court Rules and Document Design Strategies, 7 J. ALWD 193, 194 (2010).
The full article is here.
Line length in briefs
“As a general principle, those seeking to maximize the readability of extended texts in English aim for a line length of . . . 60 to 70 characters, in text size (9 to 12 point) type. Books are typically small enough—and, more importantly, horizontally skinny enough—for this goal to be achieved in a single column of text. Magazines, in contrast, being larger and broader, are always set in several columns. So too with other professionally printed documents, such as judicial opinions published in West reporters. Legal briefs—at least most of them—are set in single columns like books, but on magazine-size pages. These factors create a line length well outside the recommended zone . . . .”
Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson, Telling Through Type: Typography and Narrative in Legal Briefs, 7 J. ALWD 87, 110-111 (2010) (internal citations omitted).
Read the full article here.