Typography for Lawyers, 2nd Edition (2018)

> It's true that there are certain typographical requirements that must be met in certain court filings, but I have also seen lawyers bikeshed in Word by obsessing over things as menial as left vs. justified text alignment (and then even decide how to rephrase language after changing to justified alignment because they don't like the rivers[1] they are now seeing)

Lawyers fight over this stuff for the same reason programs fight over 4 spaces versus 8 spaces indentation. Judges have to read hundreds if not thousands of pages of briefing a week. Making it a little easier for the judge to follow your point does make a difference.

And will it win or lose cases? Probably not. But how often do appellate briefs argue that the trial judge “overlooked” or “misapprehended” some argument? Stuff gets lost in the shuffle and sometimes not putting the best version of your argument out there leads to bad rulings.

And just as in software, spending a little time up front to learn a standardized style and best practices means that in practice it should be muscle memory and take very little time to churn out briefs that look nice and are easy to read typographically.

(Also, ragged justification is a crutch for people who don’t know how to use soft hyphens. There’s a reason you never see a magazine or book with ragged justification.)

Yes, there's required typography, and there's what you might call "learned" typography. You read Butterick to look more polished, and to show judges you're educated. You fight over fonts because one font might be more legible than another. And you fight over two spaces after a period, or use (cleaned up) to show that you're in the forefront of the practice.

> You may be giving them too much credit in their cunning.

No one has to be especially cunning; it's just a tradition that develops because it works well enough. The American tradition weeds out people who don't have an incentive to help the system be efficient. The English system regulates Barristers even more. If the loss of your license doesn't mean anything (because there won't be a next time for you) then a lot of the rules lose their sting.

Judges do spot carpetbaggers and neophytes through their briefing. You've never seen a pro se brief that used CAPS FOR SHOUTING, or six different fonts? All classic marks of someone outside the normal system.

And even among lawyers, there are tells. In my jurisdiction, we don't use line numbers. A Californian who shows up with line numbers in the briefing is a dead giveaway, and vice versa.

Granted, a handful of times, pro se plaintiffs won at the Supreme Court.[1] But those are exceptions that prove the rule. I don't think it should be this way, but knowing the local judges' typography preferences counts as 'law practice.' For now.

[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2013/07/r-i-p-pro-se-litigants-befor...

I thought you were commenting on the unavailability of version control for plain text, not the psychological inertia of the users.

It would take decades of therapy to wean some lawyers off WordPerfect, let alone Word. But that's more because it's a habit-verging-on-compulsion, not because WYSIWYG software has cornered the market on version control. (Really, was WorldDocs truly any better than git?)

It would be better for everyone if documents were stored in plain text, formatted to the reader's liking by the reader, and edited with format-agnostic tools.

> Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate size

That would work IF the rendering engine knew it was supposed to use a horizontally-larger space at the end of a sentence (comparable to the CSS styling element "padding-right"). A uniformly-larger space would defeat the purpose, namely to make it easier to spot the end of the sentence through the extra space after it.

> That's a styling issue, not to be solved by typing two spaces unless you're using a typewriter. Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example).

Except that advice is way less accessible and has a fairly high cost-benefit ratio:

* Typing two spaces after a sentence: something everyone who can type already understands.

* "[A]djust[ing] the size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example)": something only a tiny fraction know how do do, and even fewer are comfortable with. It's likely some unintuitive UI that is nonstandard, and that has even been changed at points between different versions of the same Word Processor.

Even though it is a styling issue (I want about 1.5), you still need to distinguish the cases to the renderer. If you want different intersentence spacing than interword spacing, you can't just check for the presence of a period -- the rendered versions of abbreviations like "Mr.", "etc.", etc. need to not have two spaces after them. You either need a whole lot of exceptions built-in (which still fails for sentence that end with abbreviations), or to somehow mark the difference. Multiple spaces is still a nice source convention, because it's minimal and shows up approximately correctly.

(LaTeX does do simple finding of periods to support different interword and intersentence spacing. The recommendation is to use ~ after abbreviations; as a non-breaking space it also keeps Mr.~Whatsisname from appearing on two lines.)

> Nobody whose business it is to establish the correct number of spaces to put between sentences

What's the metric for establishing what is the "correct" number of spaces? I submit that it's functional, not aesthetic: the speed at which users — i.e., readers — grasp the information being presented. Whether typographers regard a single space as prettier is less important.

The unofficial standard style guide for the American legal profession is the Bluebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebook

Yea I have no idea what’s better or not. I’m not arguing about specifics. I don’t know anything about writing style. That wasn’t the point I was trying to get across.