About to insert a footnote into your skeleton argument? Think again if you want to get on the rightside of the bench.

Discussing the pressures that judges come up against during a panel discussion at London International Disputes Week, the Court of Appeal’s Lady Justice Carr said digitalisation canbe very stressful: ‘We’re working with clunky systems. We do not have hours and days of training or IT consultants in the room next door. We get volumes and volumes of stuff. Hyperlinks do not work. Just as stressful: footnotes.’

The page limit might be 25 or 50; possibly 75 with the court’s permission. ‘And then you have 333 footnotes,’ she said – with the central point lurking somewhere in the small print.

Like Lady Justice Carr, Obiter isn’t a fan of footnotes – so much so our own style guide for anyone wanting to write for the Gazette states that articles should not include them.

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