The Definitive Guide to Birther Lawyers on How to Lose an Appeal (excerpt)
First, you want to tell the judges right up front that you have a rotten case. The best way to do this is to write a fat brief. So if the rules give you 50 pages, ask for 75, 90, 125-the more the better. Even if you don’t get the extra pages, you will let the judges know you don’t have an argument capable of being presented in a simple, direct, persuasive fashion. Keep in mind that simple arguments are winning arguments; convoluted arguments are sleeping pills on paper.
But don’t just rely on the length of your brief to telegraph that you haven’t got much of a case. No. Try to come up with something that will annoy the judges, make it difficult for them to read what you have written and make them mistrust whatever they can read. The possibilities are endless, but here are a few suggestions: Bind your brief so that it falls apart when the judge gets about half way through it. Or you could try a little trick recently used by a major law firm: Assemble your brief so that every other page reads up-side down. This is likely to induce motion sickness and it’s always a fine idea to have the judge associate your argument with nausea. Also-this is a biggie-make sure your photocopier is low on toner or scratch the glass so it will put annoying lines on every page. The judge won’t even be able to decipher what you wrote, much less what you meant.
Best of all, cheat on the page limit. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure not only limit the length of the briefs, but also indicate the type size to be used. This was pretty easy to police when there were two type sizes-pica and elite. But these days it is possible to create almost infinite gradations in size of type, the spacing between letters, the spacing between lines and the size of the margins.
Now if you don’t read briefs for a living, one page of type looks pretty much like another, but you’d be surprised how sensitive you become to small variations in spacing or type size when you read 3,500 pages of briefs a month. Chiseling on the type size and such has two wonderful advantages: First, it lets you cram in more words, and when judges see a lot of words they immediately think: LOSER, LOSER. You might as well write it in big bold letters on the cover of your brief. But there is also a second advantage: It tells the judges that the lawyer is the type of sleazeball who is willing to cheat on a small procedural rule and therefore probably will lie about the record or forget to cite controlling authority.
So, if you do things just right, you will submit an enormous brief with narrow margins and tiny type, copied with a defective photocopier onto dingy pages, half of which are bound upside down with a fastener that gives way when the judge is trying to read the brief at 35,000 feet. You can lose your appeal before the judge even reads the first word.