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Aesthetic Preferences and Policy Preferences as Determinants of US Supreme Court Writing Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2023

Jeffrey Budziak  and
Daniel Lempert Open the ORCID record for Daniel Lempert [Opens in a new window]
Jeffrey Budziak
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY
Daniel Lempert*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, SUNY Potsdam, Potsdam, NY
*
*Corresponding author. Email: dalempert@gmail.com
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Abstract

Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused on style as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation of the announced policy more likely. We give a formal argument that the observed distribution of opinion clarity is not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving to write clearly in service of policy implementation-related goals; this is true even if there are case-level costs that sometimes make writing clearly more difficult. We propose that justices having aesthetic preferences – essentially, stylistic preferences over opinion language that are unrelated to policy implementation – that they weight heavily could explain the observed distribution of opinion clarity. Our analysis of some 4,500 majority opinions 1955–2008 is largely consistent with our theoretical argument.

Keywords

U.S. Supreme Courtwriting styleclarityaesthetic preferences
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2023 , pp. 45 - 66
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association

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