For most legal documents, a professional serif font — Century Schoolbook, Bookman Old Style, Palatino, or Times New Roman — set at 12 to 14 points will be accepted. But what font a legal document should be in depends entirely on where you’re filing it. Federal appellate courts require serif body text at 14-point or larger. The U.S. Supreme Court requires the Century family. Some state courts, like Florida’s appellate courts, require Arial or Bookman Old Style at 14-point. Local rules can override everything else. Check the court’s rule before you format anything.
The Safe Default Fonts
Serif fonts, the kind with small finishing strokes at the ends of letters, dominate legal typography. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure actually require serif type for the body of briefs filed in federal appeals courts.
A short list covers almost every situation:
- Century Schoolbook. The gold standard. Required by the U.S. Supreme Court and recommended by several circuits. Its generous letter shapes read well even at smaller sizes.
- Bookman Old Style. A book-weight serif with wide spacing that holds up on screen and in print.
- Palatino and Book Antiqua. Elegant serif faces that appear on approved lists in several federal districts.
- Times New Roman. Still accepted almost everywhere and universally available, but increasingly out of favor. Several courts and typography experts consider it too compressed for comfortable reading, and some jurisdictions have moved away from it.
Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Calibri, and Verdana lack those finishing strokes and tend to look cleaner on screens. Federal appellate rules allow sans-serif type in headings and captions, but not in the body text of a brief. Some state courts have gone the other direction: Florida’s appellate courts now require either Arial or Bookman Old Style at 14-point, a change driven by judges who found those fonts easier to read on monitors.
Courier and other monospaced fonts, where every character takes the same width, are holdovers from the typewriter era. The federal rules still include a monospaced option, but proportionally spaced fonts are the clear preference in modern practice.
Size, Spacing, and Margins
Font size requirements cluster around 12 to 14 points for body text, and the exact minimum depends on the court and the font. Federal appellate rules require 14-point for proportional fonts. Many state trial courts set 12-point as the floor. Some courts require a larger size for narrow fonts like Times New Roman while allowing a smaller size for wider fonts like Century Schoolbook, because a 12-point character in a wider face is physically larger than a 12-point character in a narrower one.
Footnotes typically run one or two points smaller than body text. The Supreme Court allows 10-point footnotes. Federal appellate rules don’t specify a separate footnote size but require footnote text to count toward word limits, which discourages shrinking footnotes to pack in more argument.
Double-spacing is standard for most court filings, particularly pleadings and briefs. Block quotations and footnotes are usually single-spaced. Contracts and documents not filed with a court often use single-spacing, which is more compact and easier to read in shorter pieces.
Margins of at least one inch on all four sides are the federal appellate requirement and the common rule across most courts. Some practitioners use slightly wider margins to narrow the text column, which improves readability for the same reason newspaper columns are narrow: the eye doesn’t have to travel as far to the next line.
Federal Appellate and Supreme Court Requirements
Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32 is the baseline for briefs filed in any U.S. circuit court of appeals. Body text must use a serif face at 14-point or larger if the font is proportionally spaced. Sans-serif is permitted only in headings and captions. A monospaced face can’t exceed 10½ characters per inch. Body text must be plain roman, not bold, italic, or condensed, though italics and boldface are allowed for emphasis, and case names must be italicized or underlined.
Rule 32 also requires double-spacing, one-inch margins on all sides, and 8½-by-11-inch paper. Headings and footnotes may be single-spaced. Block quotations longer than two lines can be indented and single-spaced.
The U.S. Supreme Court is more specific. Rule 33 requires booklet-format documents to be typeset in a Century family font (Century Expanded, New Century Schoolbook, or Century Schoolbook) at 12-point, with at least 2-point leading between lines. Footnotes must be 10-point or larger.
Individual circuits and district courts then layer on their own local rules. The Seventh Circuit published a detailed typography guide that allows 12-point type under its local Circuit Rule 32, even though the national rule calls for 14-point. Some federal district courts publish their own approved font lists, which can surprise attorneys filing in an unfamiliar jurisdiction.
State and Local Court Variation
State courts set their own rules, and they vary. Florida’s appellate courts require Arial or Bookman Old Style at 14-point. Other states require different fonts or sizes, and trial courts within a state sometimes impose their own formatting rules on top of the state appellate standard. When a local rule conflicts with a broader state or federal rule, the local rule controls for filings in that court.
Documents not filed with a court — contracts, memos, demand letters — aren’t bound by any of this. The serif-versus-sans-serif choice there is a matter of preference and audience, and single-spacing with 11- or 12-point type is common.
PDF Conversion and E-Filing
Nearly every court that accepts electronic filings requires PDF. Converting directly from a word processor to PDF, rather than printing and scanning, produces a searchable file and avoids the resolution loss and size distortion that scanning introduces. Some courts specifically require PDF/A, an archival version of PDF that locks formatting.
PDF conversion is where font problems sneak in. If a font isn’t embedded in the PDF, the reader’s system may substitute a different one, shifting line breaks, page counts, and spacing. Embed fonts when converting, and open the final PDF to confirm it looks right before filing. A brief that was 30 pages in Word and reformats to 32 pages in a viewer because of font substitution is exactly the problem you don’t want to find after the clerk has stamped it.
What Happens If You Use the Wrong Font
Consequences range from annoying to serious. At the mild end, the clerk’s office sends the filing back with instructions to fix the formatting and resubmit. At the serious end, the rejected filing misses a deadline and the client loses a right.
Court clerks in many jurisdictions have explicit authority to refuse non-compliant papers at the filing window. Electronic filing systems have made some formatting errors harder to catch at intake — a brief in 13-point Arial won’t trigger an automated rejection the way an obviously mis-typed paper filing might. But judges and their clerks do notice, and a brief that flouts the local rules signals carelessness before anyone reads the argument.
Some courts build in narrow exceptions. A minor font size variation that results from converting a word processing document to PDF may not be grounds for rejection if the deviation is slight and unintentional. That’s not a standard worth testing with a deadline on the line.
How To Find Your Court’s Rule
Federal court rules, including the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Procedure, are available through the U.S. Courts website at uscourts.gov, which also links to individual district and circuit court local rules. State court formatting rules are typically posted on each court’s own website, often under headings like “Filing Requirements” or “Local Rules.”
A few habits make the font question easier to manage. Build a document template for each court you regularly file in, with the approved font, size, spacing, and margins pre-set. When filing somewhere new, pull the local rules before drafting; reformatting a finished brief is tedious and error-prone. And remember that the local rule beats the general rule for filings in that court.