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« Dave Kopel on amicus briefs | Main | I hate it when attorneys wuss out »

Note on briefs

Posted by David Hardy · 13 February 2008 09:32 AM

Reader Joe Heater emails:

"An off topic question for Dave or any one who would like to answer this question and observation of a non-lawyer, a slightly tongue in cheek one. I decided after reading four amicus curiae briefs regarding the Heller v DC case, that the legal profession is the least “green” of the majors. The briefs are 45 to 75 pages in length and most of the pages use no more than 33% of the available space for text, the rest is white space. I don’t print the briefs but I imagine many people are. The forests are crying tonight as they “donate” their cellulose for white space. Reading sixty or seventy pages on the monitor is not my idea of a good time. Another thing that ragged me was the footnotes that covered two pages when there was more than ample space on the originating page to complete the note. What a pain! If you lawyers want to go to the green hall of fame, convince the profession they could save countless trees by using at least 66% of the available space on a page.

On another note, Dave K. linked to a brief filed by Jeffery B. Teichert on behalf of Scholars Correcting Myths Deployed by Opponents of an Individual Rights Interpretation… and it is a great history lesson. If you are interested, here it is.
http://www.gurapossessky.com/news/parker/documents/07-290bsacCitizensCommittee.pdf"

The answer on the white space is simple--in the Sup. Ct., your briefs have to be printed, as in on a printing press, and in a special booklet size. 6.5 x 9.5 inches, something like that. The Court only recent went to electronic filing in pdf. So when you lay out a brief in that format, on .pdf for standard 8.5 x 11 paper, there's some huge margins!

And you'll notice that (depending upon how the printing company creates the pdf), the pages may be centered, or set at left margin, or alternate left and right (which is how the printed page would be, since it's printed two-sided).

Yup. Supreme Court has quite strict rules on printing. Every set of briefs has a different color cover, so the Justices can keep track of things. You must use a particular set of fonts (Century). The rules even dictate the "leading" of the printed page. A wise person goes with one of the 2-3 printing firms that specialize in Supreme Court briefs.

12 Comments | Leave a comment

Andy Frechtling | February 13, 2008 9:49 AM | Reply

Not being a lawyer myself, I was struck by the same thing...then it occurred to me that all the white space would be useful for a reader to insert handwritten annotations, commentary or questions.

ANDREW | February 13, 2008 10:07 AM | Reply

That was exactly my thought--whenever I print out engineering journal papers I shrink the page to 80% so that I can have some fat margins for my annotations and notes!

Curtis Lowe | February 13, 2008 10:09 AM | Reply

Trees grow back...

Graystar | February 13, 2008 10:24 AM | Reply

I'm not a lawyer but I wrote a brief once in Idaho. The law described exactly how it was to be laid out, including what color the cover was to be and even what binding was to be used. The government has its reasons for the format they require, and brief preparers have no choice but to follow it.

DJMoore | February 13, 2008 10:29 AM | Reply

Lawyers? The "special-needs filing cabinet" folks? You expect them to be "green"?

As for the why of that page layout, columns that are too wide are hard to read, because the longer the line, the more easily your eye can get lost as it jumps back from the end of one line to the start of the next. This is balanced by a too-short line forcing that jump too often.

And legalese is hard enough to read without making your eyes do extra mechanical work.

The layout of the briefs strikes just the right balance.

Mike M. | February 13, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply

I'd suspect that the amount of spare space is for notes.

Letalis Maximus, Esq. | February 13, 2008 12:28 PM | Reply

Frankly, non-lawyers would be amazed at all the local rules and shit, in addition to the standard rules of civil procedure and evidence, that we have to deal with on a day to day basis, and those local rules are different in pretty much every court. If a state has more than one federal district, you can pretty much take it to bank that each district will have its own set of local rules that don't apply in the other federal districts that are in the same state. The federal circuits also have their own local rules that don't apply across the board.

As to the Supremes, they are the Big Kahunas and get to make their own rules on everything. The fact of the matter is that practice before the Supremes is so specialized that smart, and well-heeled, parties in cases before the Supreme Court end up hiring one of the 20 or so guys in D.C. who pretty much do nothing but argue cases before the Supreme Court. Ken Starr is probably the best known of the bunch.

jdberger | February 13, 2008 2:20 PM | Reply

Ha!

You should see the vast amounts of paper generated in Enviromental litigation!

e-File or no, everyone wants their own paper set with tabs and flags and sticky-notes...

Pull out your local Yellow Pages and check out how many copy shops specialize in "Legal Document Production". It's a booming business.

Sebastian | February 13, 2008 6:42 PM | Reply

Weird. I used to work with a Joe Heater. There can't be that many of them out there :)

Armed & Christian | February 13, 2008 8:05 PM | Reply

Being a veteran of the printing industry, I concur with the remark of Curtis Lowe: trees grow back. The lumber companies plant at least one for every one they chop down, and have been doing so for generations.

If you do a little research, you'll see that recycling paper is actually one of the WORSE things you can do for the environment. Every 30,000 pounds of recycled paper generates 10,000 pounds of bleach-based waste that is completely toxic to the soil and will not break down in a landfill like regular paper would. You want to be "green"? Stop recycling your paper.

skip | February 14, 2008 6:07 AM | Reply

Armed and Christian is absolutely correct!!! I once consulted at a cogen power plant in Florida that had a newspaper recycling plant as its host. The hosting agreement required the power block to process the waste water from the paper recycling process. An exotic and one-of-a-kind wastewater plant had to be built to handle all the different pollutants. Besides capital cost, the wastewater plant was a power hog from both the electrical and heat (parasitic steam) standpoint. The resulting solid waste had to be handled by a specialty waste hauler and that cost extra bucks too. Long story short, in most cases recycling (glass, paper, and plastic) is not efficient or effective in reducing environmental pollution. Only metal recycling or the old scrap yard seems to have worked, guess that’s why they’ve been around for so long.

JoeH | February 14, 2008 12:15 PM | Reply

For those grousing about my comments on the forrest and trees, you missed a the phrase in the first sentence about my question, "a slightly tongue in cheek one." :)

Sebastian - Where did you work?

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