Legal Research

Rewriting Judgments: Fixing the Courts? Bad Formatting

By Simon Fodden

Kendall Gray over at The Appellate Record has had some fun recently reformatting a Supreme Court of Texas opinion in an attempt to apply modern typographical practices to a product that still owes its shape to the typewriter. I won’t repeat here his layout choices and reasons?you can read them for yourselves—and see the before and after examples he gives.

I’ve long griped about the ugly way our courts publish their decisions, which look like something from the (by now) fuddy-duddy fifties, replete with double-spacing, two spaces after periods, 1 inch margins, etc. So I thought I’d take Gray’s choices and as much as possible apply them to an Ontario Court of Appeal judgment, to see what the result would look like.

The judgment is 1470568 Ontario Limited (East Side Mario’s) v. Prime Restaurants of Canada Inc. 2011 ONCA 9, released today. (The link is to the PDF version; the HTML version is by and large unformatted and, presumably, exists only so it can be put to further use by CanLII and others.) My rewrite, again a PDF, is available here. In my defence I have to say that this was done hastily and using another’s criteria; as well, I don’t have the best layout software at my disposal. But there are things I like about it: there are hyperlinks where appropriate; the column of text is narrower and the leading between lines smaller, which make for easier reading; headings use sans-serif while the text is in a serif typeface (not Times); there’s one space after a period; and I’ve turned on hyphenation, which makes the justified margin a trifle more tolerable.

Until the courts start publishing XML judgments which properly tag the various components of a decision, we’re not going to be able to format opinions for ourselves and will have to rely on the court administration to make them readable. In which case, whether Gray’s particular choices are adopted or not, the courts really should acquire some typographical expertise and use it to improve their judgments.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 11, 2011 (boomark / email).