Return to the main page here.
- Case law reports (collections of published court opinions cited as precedent for subsequent questions of law) tend to be massive - United States Reports (the official case law reports of the Supreme Court of the United States) alone contains an astonishing 570 published reports. West's Federal Reporter, which reports the decisions of the federal courts of appeals, includes more than two thousand volumes. And the state law reporters of West's National Reporter System, reporting the major decisions of state courts, now number somewhere around ten thousand volumes, with the largest ones (the North Eastern Reporter,note Atlantic Reporter,note Southern Reporter,note South Western Reporter,note and Pacific Reporternote ) all having somewhere between 1500 and 2000 volumes apiece. In the days before computers, law firms often had hundreds of these bound volumes on their shelves to use in legal research. (Those books you see on the back of lawyers' shelves in crime dramas are case law reports.) Thankfully, technology has allowed legal research to be performed entirely online. The Supreme Court does allow users to download them on their website
, but warns "[T]he files may 'time out' before they can be successfully loaded" if users do not "right click" on them. Many law firms retain the bound volumes to look more lawyerly. - Title 26 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (the regulations implementing the Internal Revenue Code) weighs in at 13,458 pages, in 20 volumes. You can buy a copy from the US government printing office for about a grand.
- All legislation generated by the US government is unnaturally large. The recent health care reform bill was nearly a thousand pages. The depressing part is that if they ever stuck to what the bill is actually about, they'd probably manage to get it under 50 pages every time. (Generally, these bills get to be so enormous because they contain several dozen completely unrelated "riders" that Congressmen and Senators insist must be incorporated as a condition of supporting the law)
- A significant reason for the length of the Affordable Care Act - and many other laws - is that they must be written in exact legalese to avoid any ambiguities when some group inevitably challenges it in court.note In addition, federal legislation, when printed, uses a unique formatting style - 2-inch margins, 18-point font, text double- or triple-spaced - that makes laws seem longer than they already are. This is in part simply a holdover from older printing standards, but mostly it's so lawyers and policy wonks can mark up the books. A .pdf download of the ACA, using standard formatting (12-point, 1-inch margin, 1 or 1.5 spaced), is about 170 pages. Not short by any means, but less insane than the "over a thousand pages" figure often quoted.
- Tom Clancy's Executive Orders features someone using this with a printed version of US tax code to break a table to prove a point.
- All legislation generated by the US government is unnaturally large. The recent health care reform bill was nearly a thousand pages. The depressing part is that if they ever stuck to what the bill is actually about, they'd probably manage to get it under 50 pages every time. (Generally, these bills get to be so enormous because they contain several dozen completely unrelated "riders" that Congressmen and Senators insist must be incorporated as a condition of supporting the law)
- The Federal Register is the official publication for all rules and regulations (proposals, changes, and finalized; plus public meetings) coming out of every federal agency in the United States. It is common for some days to have a page count in the hundreds. Think a document the size of the Affordable Care Act coming out weekly.
- While we're at it, the European Constitution (which would have theoretically turned The European Union into an actual nation) was slowly but effectively killed off because of its doorstopper length◊. By combining every single treaty used to establish the EU rather than simply overriding them and writing a single, universal treaty (strike 1), as well as integrating a new code of law with the constitution (strike 2), as well as several unnecessary charters including the words to the national anthem (strike 3! out), they managed to obfuscate normal citizens by the sheer size of the damn thing, which ended up causing the "No" votes in France and the Netherlands.
- A multiple doorstop because EU law requires there be a version of the text in every official language of the Union (23 at last count).
- The State of Alabama literally has no secondary laws; they just have the Constitution, the Code of Alabama, the Administrative Law, and that's it. As a result, every single law approved by the state legislature must be dumped into the Constitution. As a result, the Constitution of Alabama was literally the longest in-use constitution in the world, and weighs in at over 700 pages; for comparison, the second longest active constitution in the world, which is the Constitution of India, is 254 pages long (as published originally in the Gazette of India, with extra large font and 350 words per page). The Constitution of Alabama has 946 amendments as of early 2020, not including amendments 621 and 693, which do not exist, and aside from typical government operation stuff, they have jewels such as Amendment 938, which are the Marengo County's rules of the road for golf karts. It also contained a number of archaic unenforceable provisions relating to racial segregation that successive governments and voters had declined to excise — quite a few Alabamans had been trying to have the state constitution re-written for years, for just this reason. However, the die-hard conservative sector refused to just let it die, finally relenting and replacing it with a more streamlined version in 2022 (which also removed the racist language).
- Hansard could very well count. It is a (near-)verbatim transcript of the deliberations and debates of the British Parliament, each individual hardback volume of which covers an entire year of debate within one House, although smaller, more frequent digests are available. To give people an idea of just how mammoth that is - each volume is around 12" by 6", and 2"-3" thick, and they go back over a century.
- The United States Congress is required by the Constitution (Article I, Section 5) to maintain a similar system. It's called the Congressional Record and dates back, under various titles, to the First Congress in 1789.note Unlike Hansard, the American version not only contains (near-)verbatim transcripts of Congressional debates, but also contains speeches and presentations that Members didn't have time to say during actual floor proceedings, known as "Extension of Remarks"; this part is mainly used by the House.
- The Canada Flight Supplement is a civil/military publication by NavCanada. It contains about 800-900 pages detailing every single registered aerodrome and certified airport in Canada. It also contains some relatively easy access information about navigation laws, certain signals, and other procedures. It is considered a bible to many pilots. On cross-country trips or in unfamiliar areas, carrying a current CFS is mandatory, if not required by law. The kicker is that it's published every 56 days, with only marginally incremental changes occurring between editions. Imagine tens of thousands of these being printed every 56 days. Tree killer indeed.
- No wonder one of the key markets for e-book readers is the aviation sector.
- Also, the US' FAR/AIM (Federal Aviation Regulations and Airman's Information Manual). Every rule pertaining to all aspects of aviation in the US, in one handy package that will throw off your weight & balance calcs if you carry it in your flight bag.
- You can break a photocopier glass panel with one volume of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1424-1707 in seven nineteenth century volumes, each two feet high.
- A lawyer decided to make a compilation of ALL Brazil's tributary laws. The result is a monster of 43,215 pages of 2.2m x 1.4m and the compilation weighs 6.2 tons.
- Most Forces with Firepower have Technical and Field Manuals that fit this trope. This is because the manual for a Cool Plane or other vehicle details maintenance, repair of damage and other topics. The same is true for field manuals, they cover your strategy and what the enemy's strategy may be. Most western militaries offer their TM's as digital copies because of the space and paper those manuals requite. However, the poor sods who had to carry those doorstoppers around now have to carry militarized laptops.
- Part of the reason the United Kingdom does not have a codified constitution is because the laws that comprise its constitution are so varied and go so far back - an attempt in The '90s to write them all down (just the titles, mind you) identified nearly 500 statutes, acts, regulations, cases, treaties, and conventions, some of them dating back to the Roman era. If they had all been written down, the resulting book would have been nearly nine million words long - eighteen thousand pages that would span 1.8 linear meters if bound into volumes. And that was then - now, due to a frantic two decades of reform and the introduction of more EU treaties, the Human Rights Act 1998, devolution and the Brexit, the thing would be a substantial amount higher.
- In order to market a new drug in the US, the company must submit a New Drug Application to the FDA. The application is a comprehensive report detailing every last scrap of science that the drug company has gathered about the drug, the animal testing results, the clinical trial results, the chemistry testing, etc, etc. On top of that, it also details every step of the drug manufacturing and distribution process, all the quality control procedures and procedures for what to do when things go wrong. Basically, you must prove comprehensively that your new drug is safe and effective. The applications routinely go beyond 10,000 pages. It takes 60 days for the FDA just to determine if the application is complete. And the actual science review process will take a few dozen people and 10 months. The administrative fee alone at least $1,167,600 as of FY2015 (non-refundable). note
- A fascinating combination of this trope and its aversion comes in the US bankruptcy process. In bankruptcy, the debtor usually files a voluntary bankruptcy petition. This consists of the petition proper (itself composed of an information page/formal request for relief and ten Schedules (A-J) listing all of the debtor's property (with details about things like location, condition, and value), debts, expenses (if an individual), income (if an individual), contracts, and so on) and a Statement of Financial Affairs (SOFA for short), which is more or less Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Until late 2015 the forms the Bankruptcy Courts posted, targeted mostly towards individual debtors, don't amount to much more than 50 pages between the petition and the SOFA, and in most cases, the debtor will leave most of these pages blank, since they don't apply to them (do you own an airplane? No? Leave Question 27 on Schedule B blank, then). On the other hand, a business debtor (typically seeking a Chapter 11 reorganization) will usually have so much freakin' property, so many debts, so many contracts, and so on and so forth that the schedules run to hundreds if not thousands of pages, typically with at least one schedule taking up at least one full three-inch three-ring binder. Even smaller companies tend to have giant files, so when a really big one comes knocking on the court's door, the petition can be truly enormous (and make everyone truly thankful for electronic filing); one shudders to think what the schedules looked like for American Airlines' 2011 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Still: American Airlines and down-on-his-luck Artie Average down the street filed the same schedules and the same SOFA—it's just that while Artie left Question 27 on Schedule B blank, American wrote in, "um, All of Them."note By the same token, where Artie might have had one or two current lawsuits listed on the SOFA (of which one was, statistically, his divorce), American probably had enough to warrant a separate page (although probably none of those were divorces). That being said, beginning in December 2015, the forms were changed so that individuals fill out slightly different forms than businesses; on the other hand, the point still holds, as the forms are still fairly similar, and there is still a vast variation within each group—some businesses can have rather short petitions (Alan and Andy's Barber Shop, LLC doesn't have any airplanes either), and some individuals (typically people who were rich but do not have enough income to pay for the debt that funds it all) have giant ones.
- As a protest against increasingly complex and indecipherable rules governing their work, a Danish unemployment insurance fund decided to print the full set. All 22,408 pages of them were eventually delivered to the Minister for Employment.
- All accounting practitioners around the world have to adhere to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on how to produce and present statutory financial records. The complete IFRS is re-published every few years, with amendments, updates, and new regulations printed as smaller addendum volumes on intervening years. The latest edition of the complete IFRS was in 2015, and was over 4,500 pages long, not including amendments that would come into force after the printing of the book but before, say, it's release.
- Roman Law countries such as France, Mexico or Argentina tend to have individually short laws, since one of the principles of Roman law is trying to keep individual laws as simple as possible by doing away with Common Law complexities such as giant all-encompassing laws with tons of chaff (matter-specific laws are used instead), case law reports (since their legal relevance in Roman Law is much more limited than in Common Law), and even amendments (instead of appending an amendment, the text of the law itself is changed; entire laws have even been dumped and rewritten from scratch due to very large changes). As a result, the median length of a Mexican law is actually rather short at about 50-70 pages, and even the longest Mexican laws hardly ever pass the 300 page mark, including laws as broad and general as the Federal Tax Code (306 pages) or the Federal Civil Code (360 pages). However, because this also greatly limits the scope of each individual law, this also translates into one law for every single little topic of a country's life, which can easily translate into having hundreds of laws in effect at once; in the case of Mexico, there are currently 313 standing federal laws, some of them covering topics as specific as the Liability for Nuclear Incidents Law, the Toasted Coffee Production and Sales Law or the GMO Safety Law.
_(cropped).JPG){kind=small}
