Compare River of Life Kingdom Ministries v. Village of Hazel Crest (PalatinoLinotype, F.) with United States v. Blagojevich (HoeflerText, F.). I side with PalatinoLinotype, which seems thinner and less busy — and avoids the unfortunate capital Q of HoeflerText, see the top of p. 7 of Blagojevich.
UPDATE: I am told that this is a rare departure from consistency, stemming from the fact that Blagojevich was a rush opinion (argued June 29, decided July 2, because of the especially time-sensitive nature of the question), and is therefore being “released in typescript.” But, still, why have a different font for “typescript” opinions than for “printed” opinions? It’s not like they didn’t have the time to enter it into the computer, and so had to type it on a typewriter that only had the HoeflerText font.
Steven Lubet says:
Agreed. That Q is atrocious.
July 4, 2010, 7:54 pmThrobert McGee says:
You say “atrocious”; I say “steampunk”.
July 4, 2010, 8:00 pmSoronel Haetir says:
I can’t see the font in question, but I recall encountering some opinions out of the 6th circuit that had an incredible amount of whitespace, to the point that something like just 1/4 of the page was actually used. It seemed very odd. And even last year I encountered a couple from the 2nd circuit that were locked against accessibility.
I find it amazing that these things don’t go through a formatting office that applies a style sheet as part of automated processing. It would even make sense for that work to go to one central office rather than letting the circuits flounder around on their own. Free the judges from any worries about type setting concerns at all.
July 4, 2010, 8:04 pmUChicago says:
When you take a class with Easterbrook, on the first day he provides, (and discusses) a lengthy memo concerning typeface and formatting. He is pretty adamant about what is good style and what is bad style.
July 4, 2010, 8:07 pmHoward Gilbert says:
Why then does the Stewart Baker post two down in VC display in Times New Roman 16 while the other VC posts are in Lucida Grande 10? Usually this is not a function of actual choice but rather some undesirable decision imposed by the editing tool. I can think of no rational reason why each paragraph wraps a span that wraps a span that wraps a span that wraps the actual text.
[Whoops, sorry, fixed! -EV]
July 4, 2010, 8:28 pmCDR D says:
Maybe when Posner and Easterbrook get *McDonald* on remand they’ll opt for Runic.
July 4, 2010, 8:34 pmPraetorius says:
At least it’s not Courier 72
July 4, 2010, 8:36 pmjim sweeney says:
Fussy fellows…
July 4, 2010, 9:04 pmCornellian says:
I suppose, given our current political climate, we’ll now get about 200 comments on which font is the “liberal” font and which font is the “conservative” font. Without the proper label, how are we supposed to know which font to prefer?
July 4, 2010, 9:27 pmEE Student says:
It appears that the font difference has to with the fact that Blagojevich was decided so quickly and is a “typescript” opinion (see the footnote at the bottom of the first page). Why these use a font with such a lousy Q is beyond me, though.
July 4, 2010, 9:43 pmBZ says:
Actually, I like the Hoefler because the upper case J looks like an “F”, so the words Chief Judge come out a little different.
July 4, 2010, 10:03 pmMark Horning says:
I work for the Air Force. Everything goes out in Times New Roman. Period.
July 4, 2010, 10:08 pmThis is much better than 20 years ago when everything went out in Currier.
cboldt says:
– which font is the “liberal” font and which font is the “conservative” font. –
July 4, 2010, 10:12 pmThe answer to that is obvious, particularly under the definition of “conservative” that includes “hidebound to tradition.”
Jay says:
Yeah; the 7th Circuit, along with a few others, normally has its opinions professionally typeset, so this is the rare exception. If you want to see a real lack of uniformity, look at the 2d Circuit. For semi-uniform ugliness, the 11th or 5th.
July 4, 2010, 10:12 pmJay says:
I would also say, if you’re going to release something in “typescript” to get it out quickly, just convert the word processor file to pdf and be done with it. The problem with the Blago opinion is that it looks like some law clerk was assigned to spend an hour trying to make it look as much like a standard 7th Cir. opinion as possible, with predictable resulting weirdnesses.
July 4, 2010, 10:17 pmsteve says:
EE Student has it 100% right. The Seventh Circuit is about as consistent as you’ll get, and this Blagojevich opinion is a rare exception, explained in the initial footnote.
July 4, 2010, 10:51 pmfonter says:
1) I don’t understand what they are doing to have the opinions “professionally typeset.” The opinions looked to me like something anyone could’ve done with a word processor, with minimal instruction. I don’t get the difference between that and “typescript.” Maybe I’ll call the clerk of court to ask them about it and they can send me one of Easterbrook’s treatises on fonts!
2) Posner has been using Palatino Linotype for years now. From what I can tell he’s the only judge there who does so. Where I practice, most federal district courts use Times New Roman (NOT my favorite, but it’s the dominant font in the legal profession) or the wretched Courier.
3) Jay- the 5th Circuit puts everything out in Century Schoolbook, which I consider a very nice font. It’s the one Easterbrook uses, as well as the US Supreme Court. Why do you call it ugly? Are you thinking of a few years ago, when everything was in Courier?
July 4, 2010, 11:12 pmWilliam Woody says:
If you really want a conservative font (meaning one seeped in tradition), you can’t beat Caslon. This font was originally used in the Americas in the late 1700′s and early 1800′s to print a number of very important documents, including print editions of the Declaration of Independence. Adobe has a version of Caslon based on the original 18th century specimen page.
As far as a liberal font goes, the movie Helvetica makes the argument very well that Helvetica–in it’s modern grotesk design and negation of the humanist forms from the 1500′s–makes it the perfect liberal font. Personally, though, I’d pick a geometric sans-serif, such as Futura or Gotham: geometric fonts come from the tradition of finding the new and fresh by negating the past. (As an aside, Gotham is the font used by the Obama presidential campaign.)
July 4, 2010, 11:15 pmleo marvin says:
I’d use Webdings, but I agree with the OP. What’s up with that “Q?”
July 4, 2010, 11:29 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Enh. I prefer Bembo to either, but agree with Eugene as between these two.
July 4, 2010, 11:38 pmFinally, a Legal Issue I Feel Confident Weighing In on. | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] Definitely go for the Palatino. [...]
July 5, 2010, 12:13 amReaderY says:
Ahhh…to have the leisure not only to dispute such things, but to have members of the public paying the bills while one is doing so.
Such a life.
July 5, 2010, 12:25 amDisplaced Midwesterner says:
From what I’ve seen, this is pretty typical. All the Seventh Circuit published opinions are eventually released in professionally done Palatino, while some opinions that need to be released quickly are issued in a different font. For what it’s worth, the final Palatino font opinions look better than any other court’s opinions I’ve seen, including the Supreme Court’s.
July 5, 2010, 12:25 amronbo says:
Palatino is an elegant face and probably among the best for something as serious as a judicial opinion. But it’s pretty amazing that anyone who wasn’t a type geek could dig deep enough into the font bin to come up with Hoefler.
I had never thought of it as a “steampunk” face but that really is a perfect description. And the “Q” is totally cool.
July 5, 2010, 12:55 amChris says:
Italicized capital Y: yuck.
July 5, 2010, 1:14 amJay says:
1) I don’t really know what “professionally typeset” means either, and am guessing the concept is something of a relic, but I would distinguish the opinions put out by, off the top of my head, the DC, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 9th Circuits, from the rest. All those circuits look as if someone has gone through and standardized them, while the other circuits I look at regularly don’t. The 9th actually sequentially numbers their page numbers. I don’t really understand the point of this, exactly, since AFAIK the paper “slip” version is from West and standardized to a different set of norms, across the judiciary. There’s some kind of 7th Circuit writing treatise on its website, as I recall, although Easterbrook isn’t credited as the author. He probably spent one summer in Alaska writing it, though.
3) Yeah; Century Schoolbook is a nice font, although some judges (I always notice CJ Jones) refuse to space their opinions the same as everyone else, which is a little jarring. Also, at one point at least, when a DJ sat by designation, they just took whatever the DJ wrote in whatever random format and issued it as the opinion, without any attempt at conversion (I suppose we’re both revealing where we clerked, unless you’re just very observant about fonts : )). They’re also not very standardized other than that (the amount of information about the lower court/case number; the form of the authoring judge’s name). I guess I was more thinking of the fact that it’s pretty apparent that in these circuits (also the 8th, 10th) someone is just taking the WP file as composed in chambers and clicking “publish to pdf” to make the final opinion.
July 5, 2010, 5:27 ammaplestar says:
I’m going to disagree here. I much prefer the Hoefler. That italic Q is unfortunate, but seems legible to me when I try it with words. It’s the fact that it shows up in an initialism that jars me.
Reading this has made me wish that I had a few hundred dollars to throw around on fonts so I could use the Hoefler on my computer.
July 5, 2010, 6:23 amStephen Lathrop says:
A relic indeed. Professional typography largely got killed off before 1995, the victim of a technical revolution which put powerful typesetting tools into the hands of everyone who could buy a computer. That destroyed the market for those with specialized typographic skills. Unfortunately, it did nothing to transfer those skills to the newly empowered.
The loss is real. If there were an ability to manage the typesetting of judicial opinions, assuring uniformity and high typographic standards, the resulting documents would speak with greater authority.
One helpful objective in choosing type for persuasive purposes is to get any mental image of the document’s creator out of sight, letting readers experience the content almost as if it were their own cognition, via the almost miraculous transparency of type. That experience is maximized when reading is unimpeded by quirks, peculiarities, and visible artifacts of the human decision making process that attended document creation.
In constructing that kind of presentation everything matters—readability, legibility, margins, line spacing, letter spacing, word spacing, kerning of particular character pairs, quadding choices (flush left/flush right/centered/justified) line ending decisions, the size of the lower case in relation to the upper case, the length of ascenders and descenders in relation to line spacing, the weight relations among bolder type, lighter type, and italic type, the overall appearance of the density of type on the page (think shades of grey), historical associations a font may invoke, the proportionate deployment of type blocks in relation to the shape of the page, the correct use of specific typographic elements (such as the three kinds of dashes), explicit formatting, implicit formatting, and on and on. With everything done right, the resulting artifact takes on something of the character of a work of nature—a category peculiarly resistant to critical quibbling.
By contrast, whenever any graphical element draws the focus of the reader, he is subtly reminded that he is in a conversation with a potentially fallible fellow human, who made a decision to do it one way instead of another. Too much of that detracts from authority.
July 5, 2010, 7:05 amJason Steck says:
Shouldn’t “compare” and “with” be italicized according to BB Rule 1.2.(b)?
*duck*
July 5, 2010, 10:11 amSteve2 says:
Umm… if the Q in question is the character I think it is, it just looks like a 2 to me. A fancy 2, but a 2.
Personally, I like Garamond as a font.
July 5, 2010, 10:27 amruuffles says:
You’re referring to their use of different fonts for various opinions within a single pdf , right?
July 5, 2010, 10:51 amAllan Leedy says:
The concept of a typeface to fit the particular matter is intriguing. In Blagojevich they missed an opportunity to use Comic Sans.
July 5, 2010, 10:52 amAnonymous says:
I can assure you that this formatting was all Easterbrook.
The funny thing is, the Seventh Circuit used to use two different fonts for the actual, typeset, published opinions, depending on which judge wrote an opinion. Compare, for instance, this Manion opinion to this Rovner one. They standardized on Palatino (which was the minority choice among the judges, and which to my eye looks worse) a few years ago, possibly because the font differences meant you could sometimes tell who prepared a per curiam opinion.
July 5, 2010, 11:24 amMLS says:
Based upon many decisions I have read over the years, the TT font “Symbols” would have added significant clarity in those instances.
July 5, 2010, 12:30 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Steve2,
Umm… if the Q in question is the character I think it is, it just looks like a 2 to me. A fancy 2, but a 2.
No, that’s an old-style cap-Q that I have seen the likes of in other fonts, though I’d never heard of Hoefler.
It doesn’t actually bother me that much; it’s comparable to the funky bass clef you see in Novello classical-sheet-music editions, in that it doesn’t look like the symbol as you normally see it, but it’s easy enough from context to see what it’s meant to be. (Sample page here if anyone’s curious what said squiggle looks like. The Novello C-clef (viola) is almost equally distinctive.)
July 5, 2010, 12:51 pmStephen Lathrop says:
For what it’s worth the font comparison is somewhat unbalanced, because the Palatino has been handled with at least minimal skill, but the Hoefler has been set with too little line space throughout. Note the actual clashes of ascenders and descenders. The busy look of the text and oppressive blackness of the overall appearance would be alleviated with the addition of at least 4 points of lead.
July 5, 2010, 2:25 pmnon-native speaker says:
In “Qualified Jury Wheel” (p. 8 of Blagojevich), however, the capital Q is rendered fine.
July 5, 2010, 3:54 pmAnonymous says:
Both of the opinions were, indeed, produced by directly printing word processor documents to PDF. If you look at the PDF “properties” of the opinions, you will see that Judge Posner’s opinion was composed in WordPerfect and printed to PDF, and Judge Easterbrook’s opinion was composed in Word and printed to PDF. Today, “professional typesetting” would be done digitally using a “professional” page layout program such as Adobe InDesign (or a program such as LaTex), which can produce much better results than WordPerfect or Word.
July 5, 2010, 5:42 pmThrobert McGee says:
Exactly right — it’s just a typeset version of the traditional cursive “Q”.
If I’m not misremembering my childhood reading, in Beverly Cleary’s series of books about a little girl named Ramona G. Quimby, the unsightly and confusing 2-ness of the cursive Q greatly offended the aesthetic sensibilities the title character when her class began learning cursive.
Thus, even when writing in cursive, Ramona insisted on block-printing the first letter of her last name. (Complete with little cat ears and whiskers on the Q — an idiosyncrasy she had developed at an earlier age when first learning to write in block-print, and would sometimes forgot to put a “cat tail” on the Q to distinguish it from an O.)
July 6, 2010, 1:14 amThrobert McGee says:
The cursive capital G [as it was given on the Zaner-Bloser handwriting chart above the chalkboard -- Th.M] always used to bother me, because I thought it looked “weird”, which is to say, nothing at all like the printed G or g), especially when I had to write it as the third letter of my surname. (NB: The “Zaner-Bloser” version of the G is essentially the same as in the General Mills logo.)
July 6, 2010, 1:39 amc.s.b. says:
Typographically, the Tenth Circuit’s opinions are extremely consistent. Unfortunately, they’re consistently Times New Roman, double-spaced.
July 6, 2010, 2:27 pm