Avoid ‘talking footnotes.’ Banish bibliographic algebra to footnotes.

Use footnotes for citations, and seldom for anything else. 

Don’t use ‘talking footnotes’—footnotes containing amplification, further argument, or further discussion. Avoid those substantive or textual footnotes. “If your point is important, it belongs in the text; if it is not important, it does not belong in the brief.” Harvey C. Couch, ‘Writing the Appellate Brief,’ 17 Practical Lawyer, 1971,27, 30.

Footnotes detract and distract from readability. They interrupt the reader’s enjoyment of your prose, a pleasure not incomparable to other, more familiar pleasures: “Encountering a footnote is like going downstairs to answer the door while making love,” laments Judge Mark Painter. Mark P. Painter, ‘30 Suggestions to Improve Readability, or How to Write for Judges, Not Like Judges,’ 13, judgepainter.org/publications.

Reserve footnotes for citational hieroglyphics. Don’t clutter up the body of your work “with jumbles of letters and numbers,” like [2011] 16 NWLR (Part 1272), 62, 75. Painter.

Citations belong in footnotes: “As to citations, they belong in footnotes. Putting goofy letters and numbers in the middle of paragraphs destroys readability. We had to do that with typewriters, just as we had to use underlining because typewriters did not have italics. No more.” Painter.

Nigerian jurist Sir Roland Ahiakwo rightly decries “in-text system of referencing of authorities that makes reading boring and unpleasant.” Roland I. Ahiakwo, Judging and Judgment Writing in Plain English, Multi-Intelligence, 2009, preface.

Putting citations in the body of your brief “clutters the text, slows the reader, and hampers the writer’s ability to construct a coherent paragraph. Few writing reforms would benefit the legal world more than adopting the following rules: (1) put all citations in footnotes; and (2) ban footnotes for all purposes other than providing citations.” Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, 3rd ed., OUP, 2011, 158.

So put all citations in footnotes and put only citations in footnotes. “[T]he system used for citing references should be designed to give minimum interruption to readers’ progress through the text. It should allow them to concentrate on primary information.” Christopher Turk & John Kirkman, Effective Writing: Improving Scientific, Technical, and Business Communication, 2d ed. 1989,  69–70.

Ideas and propositions, not codes and passwords, should control legal writing and dominate legal prose.

Exporting citations to footnotes enhances readability. Before they ever think of looking up any authority you cite, judicial readers want to read through your brief, preferably at one sitting. Putting your citations in the text suggests you expect the judge to pause at each authority, go to the library, and study the authority. 

Citational footnotes are all right, but talking or textual footnotes are not. 

God never intended us to read footnotes, and we won’t. So don’t put what you want read in footnotes. And God never makes mistakes. If God had planned that we should read footnotes, He would have set our eyes vertically instead of horizontally. Even God doesn’t read footnotes.

Set all footnotes in smaller point size, single-spaced than the body of your work. In an article or brief, number your footnotes consecutively throughout the work, no matter the number of footnotes. But in a book, restart the footnote numbers at the beginning of each chapter.