Typography for Lawyers

“The four most important typographic choices you make in any document are point size, line spacing, line length, and font, because those choices determine how the body text looks.” Matthew Butterick, Typography for Lawyers: Essential Tools for Polished and Persuasive Documents, “Summary of Key Rules” (2010).

Does that sentence make any sense to you? If so, find Butterick’s book: you will love it.

If not, run out and get Butterick’s book: you need it.

After running a website on typography for lawyers, www.typographyforlawyers.com, Matthew Butterick last year published a book on the subject. The book seems designed to do for typography what Bryan Garner’s work has done on matters of style and usage—to convince more lawyers that this “small stuff” matters in their writing, in their approach to the practice.

Indeed, Butterick’s belief that “typography” should become part of the vocabulary and professional awareness of lawyers forms the “core principles” of his book:

  1. Good typography is part of good lawyering.
  2. Typography in legal documents should be held to the same standards as any professionally published material. Why? Because legal documents are professionally published material. (Corollary: much of what lawyers consider “proper” legal typography is an accumulation of bad habits and urban legends. These myths will be set aside in favor of professional typographic habits.)
  3. Any lawyer can master the essentials of good typography.
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Climbing Mountains and Creating Diamonds

We have all heard them. In the frazzled squeals of over-caffeinated classmates, in the somber tones of shell-shocked 2Ls, and occasionally, through the uncontrollable tears of a humbled perfectionist (hopefully not): Law school exam horror stories. These frightening tales echo throughout Eckstein Hall: “One exam counts for your entire grade!” “My Civil Procedure exam took over three hours!” “Twenty minutes into the Torts Final the kid next to me just threw down his pen and walked out!” Now I am not here to scare you, but I am also not going to lie to you, law school exams are not fun. Rather, I am here to give you advice based on how I survived my first semester of law school exams.

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Assessing Law Students’ Learning

Yesterday we were fortunate to have Professor Sophie Sparrow of the University of New Hampshire School of Law speak to the law school faculty. Professor Sparrow’s talk was entitled “What Have They Learned? Assessing Law Students.”

Professor Sparrow began by noting that the term assessment has multiple meanings. Among other definitions, assessment can be a deep approach to learning and the process of feedback, or it can be the instrument or evidence of teaching.

Regardless of how assessment is defined (and Professor Sparrow recommends not getting too bogged down in the specific vocabulary), the key to assessment is to make it sustainable and to embed assessment in what is already happening in the class.

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