Legal Commentary

My thanks to Dan et al. for having me back on Prawfs! 

For as long as I can remember, the default page margins on a Microsoft Word document have been 1.25'' on the left and right sides.  In my 7th or 8th grade "typing" class (yes, that's what it was called), I believe we were taught that 1'' margins are standard all around.  So why the extra .5'' of wasted side space?  As you know, Microsoft Word dominates the word processor market around the world.  Sure, lots of people change the default margins.  But I'm sure lots of people just stick with the default.

Fortunately, I recently bought Office 2007, and it appears that Microsoft has switched to standard 1'' margins.  Nevertheless, a lot of trees have died in the interim.  In the days when I interviewed for management consulting jobs, I would occasionally get questions like, "How many telephone booths are there in Manhattan?" (yes, "telephone booths" is what they were called).  You were expected to make some reasonable assumptions and come up with an answer.  In that line, how many extra trees has Microsoft killed by setting 1.25'' side margins instead of 1'' side margins.  To get you started, you might use the assumption here that a 60 foot pine tree makes very roughly 80,000 sheets of paper.

P.S. Yes, I know that even 1'' margins are more than we need.  And yes, double spacing has even more blood pulp on its hands.