![]() On a typewriter, each line is the height of the font, thus double spacing means twice the font size. That’s why court rules usually call for double-spaced lines. Most courts adopted their line-spacing standards in the typewriter era. So, what’s the difference? Matthew Butterick explains on his website Typography for Lawyers: If you click the line-spacing dropdown menu, you get a list of choices: 1.0, 1.15, 2.0, etc. The term 1.0 is known as single spacing and 2.0 is known as double spacing. What’s the difference between double spacing and 24-point spacing? Let me use Microsoft Word to illustrate. Amazon Web Services, Inc., the law firm representing Amazon, Susman Godfrey, filed a 25-page brief using 12-point font, one-inch margins and 24-point line spacing. double-spaced and in 12-point font with 1-inch margins.” (This is a terrible way to format documents, but that’s another post.) ![]() Like several other judges in the Southern District of New York, Judge Marrero’s individual practices include a rule that certain types of briefs must be “limited to 25 pages. ![]() And if lawyers aren’t willing to push back on these silly formatting rules (in a principled way, unlike the firm in this story), then it will be even harder to improve the typography and readability of court documents, which I believe is crucial for our society. But what worries me most is that other lawyers who hear this story will be afraid to experiment with the formatting of their own briefs for fear of a similar rebuke. ![]() And the law firm’s skirting of the rule was inappropriate and foolish. In this case, the rule that the law firm broke is outdated and silly. Stories like this disappoint me because everyone takes away the wrong message. I imagine that if people on the street were told about it, their reactions might range from What on earth? to Lawyers will be lawyers. The story made the legal-news circuit, but was not covered widely. Last month a federal judge fined a law firm $1,048.09 for filing a document with the wrong line spacing.
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