A Master Class in Law-Review Typography, Courtesy of Steve Sachs

Steve Sachs has just uploaded a new paper, The Forum-Selection Defense, to SSRN. Others can weigh in on his argument that “forum selection is a type of waiver, and a defense.” (It strikes me as right, but I know that I’m out of my depth in this corner of civil procedure.) I’d like to talk instead about something else on display in Steve’s work: superlative typography. His draft is a visual guide to best practices in law-review-article design.

Disclaimer: Steve is a friend. We have known each other since law school and we have corresponded about typography. He graciously answered several questions about his template as I was drafting this post.

This is an interactive demonstration. Click the images for larger versions.

First, and most blatantly, this isn’t a standard 8.5″ × 11″ page. Instead, it’s 5.24″ × 8.63″. This is small, smaller even than a typical law-review page. But it works. The print is a reasonable size for reading: 11.5-point body text and 9-point footnotes. Thin pages mean narrow text blocks, so even the footnotes have comfortably short lines. The margins are small, too: less than half an inch. Small pages with small margins are ideal for reading on a computer screen, which is how most of us will experience the draft. With small margins, your PDF reader doesn’t sprawl out across your screen, even when you have a whole page open at once.

Another benefit of small pages is that you can print out the article 2-up, so that two article pages fit on each page of 8.5″ × 11″ paper. That doesn’t work well with a draft distributed using an 8.5″ × 11″ page size with wide margins: you get a 2-up page with tiny fonts and huge swathes of whitespace. But smaller pages with small margins still look great when printed 2-up.¹

Now consider a pair of facing pages. Notice the running headers. The typeface is small, which keeps the headers from dominating the page. And they are separated from the rest of the page by a generous gap, which keeps them from blending into the rest of the text. The headers are rich with information, too. The page numbers are in the outer corners, where it’s easy to spot them while riffling through pages. The inner corners hold the date, a good choice for a draft article. The centers identify the author and the article. This layout is conventional, and for good reason: it supplies everything the reader needs in one convenient place.²

I referred this as a pair of “facing” pages. In a printed law review, they would appear together. This draft is obviously not yet in printed form. But the arrangement still makes sense. PDF readers can display these pages together as a pair, which is a convenient way to read them you have the screen space. Indeed, you can read them side-by-side in full-screen mode, free from distractions.

The typeface is ITC Galliard, an absolutely lovely choice. The design is by the incomprable Matthew Carter, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the world’s leading type designers. It’s based on 16th-century fonts by the French printer Robert Granjon that have the same timeless modernity as Garamonds. Carter’s revival has a lovely geometric quality, with some unexpectedly sharp corners and chiseled serifs. (This is most obvious in the question mark, and notice also the capital ‘B’ and the capital 'C’.) But it also has a liveliness, particularly in the italic. (The lower-case 'i’ is especially ebullient.)

The use of Galliard gives the paper a classical heft: the reader intuitively senses that each word has been chosen with care. And while it it is certainly comfortably within the mainstream of the scholarly typographic tradition, Galliard is still an uncommon choice for legal writing. That means that Steve Sachs’s papers don’t look quite like anyone else’s. They’re distinctive in a good way. What is right for him is not right for everyone. But there is a good choice for everyone, and that choice is not Times.

The font size for body text is 11.5 points. There is no magic number for the 'right’ point size that works in all settings. The right size varies based on the page design and the font in question. 11.5 points is a good choice here given the other c