The Blog of the Legal Times reports that the high court will limit merits briefs to a length of 6,000 words, effective February 16. Depending on how often you're starting a new paragraph, that's a little less than 20 pages of normal, 12-point, double-spaced copy. By contrast, though, Rule 28(g) of the Mississippi Rules of Appellate Procedure limits principal briefs to a length of 50 pages, which -- again, depending on your affinity for the return key -- is somewhere north of 15,000 words. In other words, the Mississippi Supreme Court's space limits allow for briefs some 250 percent the length of U.S. Supreme Court briefs.

Now, in the interests of due consideration, there's a perfectly good reason that the state high court ought to allow more briefing than the U.S. Supreme Court: because the Mississippi Supremes consider more issues. Your average SCOTUS appeal addresses two or three issues. On the other hand, a complicated case from state court -- say, a death-penalty case -- might present more than a dozen assignments of error. And unlike the nation's high court, which focuses centrally on legal issues, the Mississippi Supreme Court regularly conducts record-intensive inquiries into the facts of cases. Arguments detailing the peculiar facts of any given case naturally will add a great deal of length to any brief.

Of course, as the BLT recounts, Chief Justice Roberts once noted that he'd never read a brief so good that it left him wishing for more. And he's right; they're not called "briefs" because they ought to break your foot if you drop them. Still, any MSSC reexamination would need to account for the fundamental differences between appeals to the two courts. And honestly, a change to Rule 28(g) probably would be, for the most part, a solution in search of a problem. Over the course of the year that I worked as a clerk at the Mississippi Supreme Court, I read maybe two or three briefs that approached 50 pages. Most briefs ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 pages, which is pretty close to the U.S. Supreme Court's new limit.

Still, the less reading the state court's justices have to do, the quicker they can render decisions in individual cases. And any rule that would hone appellate arguments while expediting finality would do more good than bad.

UPDATE (Thursday @ 9:45 a.m.) -- A loyal and astute Attorney @ Blog reader suggests that the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure probably serve as a better comparison, given the frequency with which the circuit courts of appeals review factual findings. Rule 28.1 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure limits principal briefs to 30 pages or 14,000 words for an appellant and 35 pages or 16,500 words for an appellee.