One of our intrepid Commenters on my earlier post on the "ruler incident" mentions the 7th Circuit's remarkable treatise on brief formatting rules. Quite a work to behold.

A reader asks in response to my post on the elaborate 7th Circuit brief formatting rules:

I still can't figure out why the Supreme Court is still caught up in the ridiculous 6x9 printed format for briefs when every single other court in the country accepts regular paper from a laser printer.

Does anyone know the answer to this? Why does the Supreme Court persist in this peculiarity? Is there some technological reason or is it pure tradition?

A reader sends this along:

Since you've blogged several times about font and layout standards for briefs, I thought you might be interested in (or maybe just interested in posting about) what I think is a very clear and informative article about how typography and layout affect readability in the context of legal documents. The article is Ruth Anne Robbins, "Painting with print: Incorporating concepts of typographic and layout design into the text of legal writing documents," 2 J. Assn. L. Writing Dirs. 108 (2004): http://www.alwd.org/JALWD/Robbins.pdf

Seems like a potentially useful and practical article on a topic we probably don't think about as much as we should. As one person on an earlier comment board suggested, in the past brief formatting questions were resolved through specialization and the division of labor, so they knew the answers to all of these questions. But now we do it ourselves, and we may not think about some of these practical questions.