An open letter to our appellate court justices

You have strayed from the traditions of legal literature. Where is the flair? You publish dense wordy decisions whereas your audience of practicing attorneys longs for flesh and blood narrative. Please leave it to professors, treatise writers, and law review students to put your decisions into perspective. Who has the time or the inclination to plod through exhaustive erudition that pours down week after week in the published decisions?

John Doe v. USC, 2018 DJDAR 11753 (Dec. 11, 2018) (2nd Dist., Div. 7), runs roughly 9,936 words with 39 footnotes which add 3,024 more words; Shirlean Warren v. Kia Motors, 2018 DJDAR 11786 (Dec. 12, 2018) (4th Dist., Div. 2), has 9,072 words with 400 words of footnotes; and Orange Cove Irrigation v. Los Molinos, 2018 DJDAR 11783 (Dec. 12, 2018) (3rd Dist.), over 9,000 words. These unreadable tomes are not outliers; they are the norm.

Appellate decisions chart the development of the law. Attorneys have a professional duty to stay current. Do justices want their important decisions to be read? In the army we used to say "don't explain." Let justices wield power without long, windy explanations. Justices are not advocates who need to convince anyone.

This world, both in and outside the law, is drowning in excess verbiage. I recently signed a 50-page, single-spaced, apartment rental agreement -- a classic contract of adhesion, yet totally in line with current practices. Long legal documents insult the dignity of the consumer. Attorneys are consumers, too. We consume legal literature.

Ten thousand-word decisions may have started with Malcolm Lucas. His work on the California Supreme Court exhausted one's attention span. Similar ponderous writings are common nowadays. There was a time when reading the advance sheets was a beguiling, effortless pastime. Frequently new decisions linked up with attorneys' ongoing cases and projects. Timely decisions were like finding a gold nugget at Sutter's Fort. Now one must dig deeper to discover nuggets.

To conclude, would justices please spare your audience voluminous law review style decisions. We would be better served with straightforward, concise decisions in the official reports.