Brevity may indeed
The New York Times recently reported about the uproar caused when the federal judiciary proposed shrinking the maximum word count for briefs filed in federal appellate courts by 1,500, from the current 14,000. The American Academy of Appellate Lawyers was not on board with this at all. “There are cases where the facts are complicated, and where areas of the law are complicated,” pleaded Nancy Winkelman, a partner in a Philadelphia law firm and president of the academy.
That is undoubtedly true. On the other hand, 14,000 is a lot of words to spill on any subject, no matter how complicated. (For comparison sake, that is roughly 25 times the length of the average editorial that appears in this space.) And federal appellate judges, who hear appeals from trial courts on some of the most important criminal, civil and constitutional issues that arise, deserve some sympathy. The Times calculates that based on the average caseload, a federal appeals court judge might be obliged to read some 42 million words each year. “You get numb,” Judge Laurence Silberman, who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for 30 years, confessed to The Wall Street Journal last year. Briefs “are too long to be persuasive,” he added to the Times.
And it’s not only the length, said Judge Mary Beck Briscoe of the 10th Circuit. Lawyers would do their clients and judges a favor “by focusing the court’s attention on the core facts and dispositive legal issues,” and excising tangential facts and secondary arguments on issues on which they are unlikely to prevail. In the end, a compromise was struck between the competing concerns of judges and appellate lawyers. A new rule that will go into effect Dec. 1 sets a maximum of 13,000 words for briefs.
This is an argument, of course, that also plays out in journalism, higher education and business all the time. Writers want to cram every nugget of information they have gleaned into their news articles, term papers or memos, while the editors, professors and executives who are professionally obliged to read the work advocate for more concise presentation. Sometimes we think that Strunk and White’s injunction from The Elements of Style should be posted in offices everywhere: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Trying to hold back the flood of words in the digital age may seem just as fruitless as King Canute’s exertions against the tide. Compared with its handwritten and typewritten predecessors, the computer is a word producer of awesome power, one all too often harnessed in the service of communicating every single thought that has crossed the writer’s mind on the subject at hand. And since there is no need to actually print something on paper with ink to publish it, the limits of internet communication are virtually limitless. That’s perhaps why so many web-only news sites appear to have dispensed with editors entirely.
Fortunately, though, the final veto on verbosity is held by readers, who can exercise it simply by stopping in midsentence. Obviously, no lawyer should want to risk driving a judge to distraction by an overly long pleading, just as no newspaper writer wants readers to give up halfway through an exhaustive piece he or she has labored all week to produce. But as they say, the reader is always — or almost always — right.