Camden professor highlights style strategies that reduce environmental footprint
CAMDEN — Times New Roman or Century Schoolbook? Double-spaced or 1.5 lines? These may seem like trivial decisions when typing a paper or report, but the font and spacing used for documents can leave a harmful environmental footprint.Ruth Anne Robbins, a clinical professor at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden, says one of the easiest ways to cut down on paper consumption is to make simple changes to document design.
Robbins’ article, “Conserving the Canvas: Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Legal Briefs by Re-imagining Court Rules and Document Design Strategies,” has been published in the fall 2010 edition of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors.
Robbins says paper is the largest source of waste in the New Jersey judiciary, where thousands of briefs and appeals are filed each year.
“It’s about sustainability and cost,” Robbins says. “I give three pieces of advice that courts can use to reduce paper usage. If we space our documents at 1.5 lines instead of double spacing them, we reduce paper use by almost 25 percent.”
Paper production is the fourth-worst air-polluting industry in the Unites States. To cut down on the environmental impact of paper use in the courts, Robbins also encourages double-sided printing and eliminating font and font size requirements.
“Larger or wider font sizes take up more space, which translates into more paper and the depletion of natural resources,” says the Rutgers–Camden law professor.
Federal rules require legal briefs to be written in 14-point font. In addition, the New Jersey appellate and supreme courts still demand that Courier New font be used, even though modern computers have made the “typewriter font” obsolete, Robbins says.
It’s also 30 percent wider than standard fonts in use today, such as Times New Roman 12-point or Century Schoolbook 11-point font. The wider the font, the more paper is used. The New Jersey court rule, in other words, requires briefs to use 30 percent more paper than necessary, she says.
Submitting briefs with word count limitations can also cut back on paper consumption. There are 7,000 appeals filed in New Jersey courts each year. In her calculations of the number of pages used, Robbins deliberately estimated low and assumes that there is only one plaintiff and one defendant in the case and that there are no supporting documents in the record. Given those parameters, each set of briefs for a case may have a maximum of 175 pages. Parties must produce a minimum of eight copies.
Changing the current New Jersey court rule to allow a different font and line spacing could cut paper usage about 45 percent before double-sided printing.
Robbins says she has made the recommendations to several New Jersey judges, and has also asked her own law students to practice better font and spacing habits.
“If we moved to 1.5 spacing here on campus in our assignments and our own writing, we can reduce our paper use by 25 percent,” she says.
Robbins says adopting environmentally-friendly court rules and attorney practices “would not only save us trees, but also save us time and therefore money. It’s a no-brainer.”
A Cherry Hill resident, Robbins teaches legal writing at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden and just finished her term as the national president of the Legal Writing institute. She also teaches in the Domestic Violence Clinic at the Rutgers–Camden law school.
Her article can be read here.
Media Contact: Ed Moorhouse
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E-mail: ejmoor@camden.rutgers.edu