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It’s either a holdover from typewriting, when all fonts were monospaced and so tended to need that extra yawning gap to help the eye figure out where a thought ended, or someone’s decision to round up the 1.5 spaces used by typesetters.

Wikipedia agrees:

Many descriptivists support the notion that a single space after a full stop should be considered standard because it has been the norm in mainstream publishing for many decades. This is supported by the MLA, APA, and The Chicago Manual of Style. Many prescriptivists, meanwhile, adhere to the earlier use of two spaces on typewriters to make the separation of sentences more salient than separation of elements within sentences. Since current style guides are founded on the consensus of practice, the evidence strongly suggests that most people accept the single space in modern word-processing, largely for the reason that two spaces may stretch inordinately when full justification is applied. Additionally, many computer typefaces are designed proportionately to alleviate the need for the double space (the opposition would of course reply that this does nothing to satisfy the aforementioned saliency issue). Most widely accepted contemporary style guides categorically require that only one space be placed after full stops and similar punctuation marks, and they characterise modern practice as avoiding it.
[footnotes omitted]

And besides, I’m sure that if it were brought to their attention, the courts would be embarrassed to be wasting space — which turns into wasting paper in this print-mad world — often as many as two hundred of the little critters in a single judgment. So, you jurists, tighten it up!

Thankfully, “search and replace” promptly took care of this problem in my teaching materials, but then I found myself wanting to tell you about it…

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