Legal Writing

On Legible Briefs ? The Court’s Advice

REQUIREMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR TYPOGRAPHY IN BRIEFS AND OTHER PAPERS ? a guide published by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ? is required reading for anyone following Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.

The advice it contains isn’t just for those involved in “the production of briefs, motions, appendices, and other papers” for a federal appeals court. It’s for all those who hope to produce briefs that are “more legible ? and thus more likely to be grasped and retained.”

Some highlights:

• Use italics, not underlining, for case names and emphasis.
• Use real typographic quotes (? and ?) and real apostrophes (?), not foot and inch marks.
• Put only one space after punctuation.
  
• Do not justify your text unless you hyphenate it.

Note the emphasis (mine) on putting only one space at the end of a sentence, not two. As the guide notes:

“The typewriter convention of two spaces is for monospaced type only. When used with proportionally spaced type, extra spaces lead to what typographers call ‘rivers’ ? wide, meandering areas of white space up and down a page. Rivers interfere with the eyes? movement from one word to the next.”

Full post as published by Set in Style on April 25, 2009 (boomark / email).