A while back, my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh noted a problem caused by long URLs for those of us whose written product typically requires full justification:
When I include a URL — or another long continuous chunks of text — in a footnote in Microsoft Word, the preceding line often ends up having lots of white space. The usual fix for that is to include an optional hyphen, but I don't want the URL to be hyphenated; I want it to break at a slash or a dot. At times, I've entered manual line breaks, but that's not optimal, because I don't want it to break at a fixed place; I want it to break at the place that yields the least internal white space, and that might change as the earlier lines in the footnote change, or as the article gets reformatted.
There is an obvious solution; namely, to shorten the URL to a manageable length using Tinyurl.com. Because a tinyurl is permanent, it does the same redirecting job as the full URL, while avoiding odd looking spacing problems. I've decided to start using the Tinyurl and let the law review editors fix it if they want.
