New Book: Typography for Lawyers
We recently received the new book Typography for Lawyers: Essential Tools for Polished & Persuasive Documents by Matthew Butterick, author of the companion site Typography for Lawyers. Butterick discusses best practices of typography in legal documents, including whether to use straight or curly quotation marks, when to use an exclamation or question mark, effective ways to emphasize statements and tackles the important question: one space or two after a punctuation mark?
Butterick includes sample documents that include a court caption, a sample motion and resume so readers can compare how these documents typically look before and after the typography rules have been applied.
Many courts have rules about the typography in briefs and other court documents and some of those courts follow the same rules when issuing an opinion. Some PDF versions of court opinions are difficult to read and others, like the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, have considered typography rules when publishing their opinions. Also, if you read the PDF versions of Utah appellate court opinions, you may have noticed the layout and font of theses opinions has changed. Do you think they are easier to read?