Legal Research

"Lawyer Type (4): Ragged is Right"

This post was written by Simon Fodden: "In legal documents it's the job of print to deliver the message smoothly and then get out of the way as fast as possible. Lots of things go into making this possible, as any book or magazine publisher will tell you, including the choice of typeface, point size, space between lines (leading) and colour of paper. Yet, when it comes to the preparation of legal documents the profession seems to be willfully ignorant about what makes for persuasive print, favouring remnants of the typewriter age combined with bad aspects of word processing technology.

I want to focus now on only one issue: the use of justified text -- that is, text printed in such a way that the right margins of all lines are equal. (The alternative -- where lines of text are more or less the same length -- is known as "ragged right.")..."

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Source: Slaw.ca, 21 January 2010.

Reproduced with permission of Simon Fodden, founder of Slaw.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on January 22, 2010 (boomark / email).