The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Hi Cathy...

Probably the inconsistancy regarding the font was the result of an old set of rules. In the days of typewriters, fonts were measures in CPI's (characters per inch, and the standard font size was 10 CPI, while a small ("elite") font was 12 CPI. Larger numbers indicated smaller fonts.

Now, fonts are measured in points, so a larger number means a larger font. Standard fonts are 12 point fonts, while smaller fonts are 10 points. The font "Courier" was deigned to look like a typical font from an IBM typwriter. Unfortuenately, 12 Point Courier is considered to be the equivilant of 10 CPI Courier, while 10 Point Courier is the equivilant of Courier Elite (ie 12 CPI courier).

My guess would be that your professor was working from an old rulesheet that required that tests be typed in a 10 CPI font (which was all that used to be required to ensure that folks didn't play font games by using an elite type element on their typewriter.

When the professor updated to reference computers, he switched to point requirements, but one the 10 CPI references got switched to 10 point, rather than 12 point, so it suddenly required a smaller font.

Incidentially, which of the statements in your post was correct:

1) This means I now know everything about Noerr-Pennington petitioning immunity, its sham exception, and the test for the exception

or

2) There could be some perfect cases and articles on point, but we were only required to use the class materials as the basis of our analysis.

These two statements seem mutually exclusive.

Mark

Aren't paradoxes fun?

I meant cases addressing the RIAA situation per se. But unless there's something more recent than the cases in the materials, I know everything I would need to know about NP and the sham exception in doctrinal principle. Although the materials themselves are a few years old, I think if there had been something more recent that substantively changed the law the professor would have separately included it when teaching us the unit.

The instruction read:

"The text of the paper should be double spaced with 12 inch font size (12 characters per inch)."

But to achieve that in Courier, which is fixed width, you'd need to use 10 point font. Which is kind of small, much smaller than we use for most other things, like moot court briefs. Although it seems to be what he asked for, it doesn't seem to be what he probably wants.

(Times Roman didn't seem like an option because it's a proportional font and unpredictable on how many characters would fit in an inch, since it depends on which characters.)

Yup...

What happened here is that your prof had instructions that he had been using since the days of typewriters that said: ""The text of the paper should be double spaced with 10 inch font size (10 characters per inch)."

Over time, this stopped making sense to readers, because students thought that 10 CPI meant 10 point (which it doesn't). After all, many students are young enough that they have never really had a typewriter. Someone probably used 10 point type, and that pissed off the prof-- so someone told him that 12 point was the normal type size.

Prof goes back to his instructions, and replaces the "10"'s with "12"'s. He thinks its fixed. The only problem is that he doesn't change the reference from CPI's to Points. Therefore, he is now actually requireing elite type, which is exactly what he was trying to avoid requireing (and hadn't previsously required).