WASHINGTON: In his year-end report in 2023, chief justice John Roberts celebrated “the digital revolution in the federal courts”. Electronic filing, he wrote, was “rendering paper largely optional”.But not at the Supreme Court. In addition to requiring electronic submissions, its rules instruct litigants who are not prisoners or poor to file 40 paper copies of many documents, including petitions seeking review, briefs opposing them, briefs from the parties in the cases the court agrees to hear and the accompanying flood of friend-of-the-court briefs.And that is just the beginning of the court’s elaborate requirements. The paper filings must take the form of handsome little typeset booklets printed on paper “that is opaque, unglazed and not less than 60 pounds in weight”. The rules specify permissible fonts and margins, along with how the booklets are to be bound – “firmly in at least two places along the left margin (saddle stitch or perfect binding preferred).” The booklets are, allowing for the subject matter, a pleasure to read. They are also redundant, expensive and wasteful.“The court’s rules impose significant and unnecessary costs to litigants and to the environment,” William J Aceves, a law professor at California Western School of Law, wrote in a study published last month in the University of Colorado Law Review. He urged the court to do away with paper submissions, particularly for the first round of briefs, over whether the justices should hear a case at all. Focusing solely on those early filings, Aceves calculated the court’s rules require the submission of more than 5 million pieces of paper each term.“If stacked together, these filings would reach beyond 2,000 feet, which exceeds the height of the tallest building in the US,” he wrote. “If weighed, these filings would take over 33 tonnes of paper to produce.”The court can make do with electronic filings and a single hard copy. Indeed, it did so during the pandemic, when it suspended the usual rules for filings during the first round of briefing starting in April 2020.Litigants and scholars welcomed the development. Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law, said the change signalled the end of a “byzantine policy for submitting printed briefs.” More than a year later, though, the court reinstated the rule. Some justices have said they read at least some briefs electronically. Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, used an iPad. In a 2009 interview, Justice Elena Kagan said she preferred a Kindle. Aceves said he had sent copies of his article to the court’s clerk and to the chief justice to urge them to consider the matter. “In light of my arguments, I recognise the irony of sending hard copies… But I don’t have their email addresses.”
