Giddens on Typographic Legality: The Source and Transmission of the Common Law (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press)

Forthcoming from Thomas Giddens, Dundee Law School: Typographic Legality: The Source and Transmission of the Common Law (Edinburgh University Press). 

From the publisher's website: 

The typographic form of judgment stages the authoritative presence of the common law. It is in the encounter with typographic materials that legal meaning is generated, yet typographic legality—the material expression of law as visual text—is rarely examined. In this book, Thomas Giddens refocuses critical attention by studying the history of the common law’s visual technologies and unpacking the heritage, meanings and techniques of its typographic appearance. It thereby develops new methodological approaches for reading the common law’s primary materials as visual media. From the archive as a typographic theatre of jurisdiction, to early law report printing, to the mass duplication of reports and their entanglement in the project of empire, to the common law’s digital display, Typographic Legality encounters enduring questions of legal authority, media and technology in the material details of the common law’s textual form.

Thirty percent discount available with the code NEW30. 

Legal Typography

Derek H. Keirnan-Johnson, University of Colorado Law School, has published Telling Through Type: Typography and Narrative in Legal Briefs, in the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Here is the abstract.

Most legal authors today self-publish, using basic word-processing software and letting the software’s default settings determine what their documents will look like when printed. As these settings are not optimized for legal texts, they do so at their peril. The default font Times New Roman, for example, as Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook warns, is "utterly inappropriate for long documents [such as] briefs."

Commentators have started urging a more deliberate approach to legal typography. Their suggestions, however, have been content-neutral, intended for all legal texts and focused on goals such as legibility and readability.

Typography, however, has much greater potential. The shapes, the spacing, of letters and of words can reinforce, compliment, and independently create narrative meaning. Or, intentionally or unintentionally, it can cut against it. It can do its work honestly and ethically, or inappropriately and subversively. This article explores how.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.