University of Arkansas at Little Rock: UALR Bowen Law Repository

Hudson, Blake

Spencer, Evan

English

Denying Disaster: A Modest Proposal for Transitioning from Climate Change Denial Culture in the Southeastern United States

Schweitzer, Dan

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process 
Volume 19 
Issue 1 04/01/2018 Article 7 
2018 
A Word of Introduction: U.S. Supreme Court Brief Writing Style 
Guide 
Dan Schweitzer 
Follow this and additional works at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/appellatepracticeprocess 
 Part of the Legal Writing and Research Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Dan Schweitzer, A Word of Introduction: U.S. Supreme Court Brief Writing Style Guide, 19 J. APP. PRAC. & 
PROCESS 125 (2018). 
Available at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/appellatepracticeprocess/vol19/iss1/7 
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THE JOURNAL OF APPELLATE PRACTICE AND PROCESS Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2018) 
A WORD OF INTRODUCTION: U.S. SUPREME COURT 
BRIEF WRITING STYLE GUIDE
Dan Schweitzer* 
Should appearances matter? In principle, no. We should not 
judge a book by its cover or a person by his or her physical 
attractiveness. Likewise, one supposes, a judge should not assess 
a brief differently depending on whether it is written in Courier 
(ugly) or New Century Schoolbook (lovely). So what can be less 
useful than a guide to appellate brief writing that is, at bottom, 
about appearances? 
Yet my U.S. Supreme Court Brief Writing Style Guide is 
about little else. It provides no advice on the types of legal 
arguments that are effective in the Supreme Court. And it 
provides only occasional advice on how to write a convincing 
appellate brief. Most of the Style Guide is instead devoted to 
matters such as how properly to cite a Supreme Court case (cite 
only the official U.S. Reporter) and how the Opinions Below 
section should read. Why did I bother? 
The answer, of course, is that appearances do matter. A job 
applicant should not show up for an interview wearing a t-shirt 
and ripped jeans. A male attorney appearing in court ought to 
wear a tie. When we bungle how we present ourselves, we are 
judged harshly—and for good reason. Sloppy, inappropriate 
attire is a sign. It tells us that the person is too green to know 
what’s appropriate and didn’t care enough to find out. 
Legal briefs are judged—to an extent—the same way. 
Judge Wald noted in these pages almost 20 years ago that “you 
cannot imagine how disquieting it is to find several spelling or 
grammatical errors in an otherwise competent brief. It makes the 
*Director and Chief Counsel, NAAG Center for Supreme Court Advocacy. Readers can 
reach Mr. Schweitzer at dschweitzer@naag.org or 202.326.6010. 
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126 THE JOURNAL OF APPELLATE PRACTICE AND PROCESS
judge go back to square one in evaluating the counsel.”1 I wrote 
the Style Guide to address a related flaw in too many Supreme 
Court briefs I had read: the failure to abide by the Court’s 
unwritten rules and customs. 
At bottom, it’s about establishing credibility. A court is 
more likely to accept your characterization of the facts and your 
explanation of the law if you have earned its trust. Time and 
again, judges and experienced practitioners have told me that 
nothing is more important for an advocate then establishing 
credibility with the court. That is especially true for repeat 
players—such as the group of attorneys with whom I work, 
members of state attorney general offices. 
So how do you establish and maintain credibility? To 
loosely paraphrase Chief Justice Roberts, the way to earn trust is 
to act trustworthy.2 That means being scrupulously honest and 
accurate; not misstating the facts or the law; not exaggerating or 
omitting key matters; treating the court, opposing counsel, and 
court personnel with courtesy; and communicating with the 
court—in writing and orally—in a temperate, reasoned tone.3
It also means avoiding typos, using proper citation form, 
and doing the other myriad small things that make a brief look 
just right. Justice Scalia explained why judges care about that: 
There’s a maxim in evidence law or criminal law or 
whatever: falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. If you show that 
a witness lied about one thing, the jury can assume that he 
lied about everything. False in one, false in all. It’s the 
same thing about sloppiness. If you see somebody who has 
written a sloppy brief, I’m inclined to think this person is a 
sloppy thinker. It is rare that a person thinks clearly, 
precisely, carefully and does not write that way. And 
contrariwise, it’s rare that someone who is careful and 
precise in his thought is sloppy in his writing. So it hurts 
1. Patricia M. Wald, 19 Tips from 19 Years on the Appellate Bench, 1 J. APP. PRAC. &
PROCESS 7, 22 (1999). 
2. See Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 v. Jefferson 
Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 551 U.S. 701, 748 (2007) (Roberts, C.J.) (“The way to stop discrimination 
on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”). 
3. See Theodore B. Olson, Ten Important Considerations for Supreme Court Advocacy,
44 LITIGATION 12, 13–14 (2018). 
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INTRODUCTION: SUPREME COURT STYLE GUIDE 127
you. It really hurts you to have ungrammatical, sloppy 
briefs.4
It also hurts you to write a brief that fails to conform to the 
Court’s unwritten rules and customs. To return to an earlier 
example, in most courts the proper way to cite Roe v. Wade is 
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 
(1973). In the Supreme Court, the proper citation form is Roe v. 
Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). If your Supreme Court brief uses 
the former citation, every Justice and law clerk who reads the 
brief will immediately react negatively. Every one of them will 
think, “This person doesn’t know how we do things up here.” 
Worse, every one of them will think, “This person didn’t have 
the good sense to go on the web and look at how the Solicitor 
General’s office or other regular practitioners here write their 
briefs.”
Will the Court deny your cert petition simply because it 
used the wrong citation form for Supreme Court decisions? Of 
course not. But it puts you behind the eight ball. It’s one knock 
against your credibility. And there are a hundred other similar 
ways you can lose credibility points that the Style Guide walks 
through.
Instead of having a Statement of the Case that describes 
both the factual and procedural backgrounds (usually in that 
order), you might without the Style Guide’s advice follow many 
lower courts’ practice of having a Statement of the Case 
(describing its procedural history) followed by a Statement of 
the Facts. You might italicize the codes and reporters in 
statutory and case citations—as they do in New Jersey state 
courts, but not the U.S. Supreme Court. You might cite the 
decision under review by citing the federal reporter rather than 
the cert petition appendix. There are even ways to mess up the 
cover page. (If I see another lawyer put his or her state bar 
number on it, I’ll scream.) But of course you won’t make these 
greenhorn mistakes if you adopt the Supreme Court style 
outlined in the Style Guide.
After more than two decades working on Supreme Court 
cases as Supreme Court Counsel for the National Association of 
4. Bryan Garner, Justice Antonin Scalia, 13 SCRIBES J. LEG. WRITING 51, 71 (2010) 
(transcribing Mr. Garner’s interview of Justice Scalia). 
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128 THE JOURNAL OF APPELLATE PRACTICE AND PROCESS
Attorneys General, it seemed time to put this all down on paper. 
It began as a list of pet peeves. (For goodness sake, don’t write 
your Questions Presented in all caps!) With time, it became a 
comprehensive walk through the different sections of Supreme 
Court briefs. All the while, its focus remained on style, not 
substance.
Earning credibility can be difficult. No one wants to 
acknowledge that a recent precedent supports the other side’s 
position. Our fingers resist typing the bad but relevant fact that 
makes our client look less appealing. Adhering to a court’s brief 
writing customs and practices is—or ought to be—the easy way 
to gain credibility. 
Newcomers to Supreme Court practice already start at a 
disadvantage. A modern Supreme Court bar has emerged, whose 
members possess “years of advocacy experience before the 
Court, settled expertise in the workings of the Court, and in-
depth knowledge of the concerns and predilections of the 
individual Justices.”5 They have also built up a large store of 
credibility with the Court. 
The first-timer must earn the Court’s trust and respect one 
page at a time, one brief at a time. Mostly, she will do so by 
writing well-organized, cogently reasoned, even-toned 
documents. But she will also do so by making each sentence and 
each page look the right way. That means no typos, no 
grammatical errors, and adopting the Supreme Court’s 
distinctive style customs. I hope the Style Guide helps appellate 
attorneys accomplish that task. 
5. Richard J. Lazarus, Advocacy Matters Before and Within the Supreme Court: 
Transforming the Court by Transforming the Bar, 96 GEO. L. J. 1487, 1525 (2008); see
also John G. Roberts, Jr., Oral Advocacy and the Re-emergence of a Supreme Court Bar,
30 J. SUP. CT. HIST. 68 (2005).  


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