This is a follow-up to my prior post about the controversy among appellate judges and some appellate attorneys regarding the proper use of footnotes. I’ll go ahead and admit that early in my legal career I committed the cardinal sin of editing a brief for a page length limitation by simply cutting and pasting paragraphs from the argument and placing them in footnotes (where the text is single-spaced instead of double-spaced). If that is the absolute worst use of footnotes, what follow is my description of the proper use of footnotes. While some judges state they don’t want any footnotes in a brief, and other appellate attorneys may want to place all citations to authority in footnotes to maintain a clean narrative text, I…
Tagged: Appeal, appeal brief, appellate briefs, footnotes, Michael Skotnicki