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The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ryan C. Black ,
Ryan J. Owens ,
Justin Wedeking  and
Patrick C. Wohlfarth
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Abstract

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual-level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue-specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 703 - 732
Copyright
© 2016 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We thank Thomas Marshall for sharing his public opinion poll data and workshop participants at the University of Maryland, College Park for helpful feedback. We are responsible for all interpretations and errors.

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