U.S. Supreme Court Sets Record for Longest Opinions Ever
The U.S. Supreme Court set a record last term that may not be welcome news to law students or journalists that report on its opinions: The median length of the court’s majority opinions was the longest ever.
The median majority opinion last term had a record-setting 4,751 words, the New York Times reports. The median length of the entire decision, including the majority and all separate opinions, was 8,265 words, also a record. In the 1950s, by way of contrast, the median length of opinions was about 2,000 words.
Some critics say today’s lengthy opinions aren’t necessarily models of clarity. “Critics of the court’s work are not primarily focused on the quality of the justices’ writing, though it is often flabby and flat,” the story says. “Instead, they point to reasoning that fails to provide clear guidance to lower courts, sometimes seemingly driven by a desire for unanimity that can lead to fuzzy, unwieldy rulings.”
Political scientists James Spriggs of Washington University in St. Louis and Ryan Black of Michigan State collected the data on opinion length. The article also cited other studies that found:
• Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer are the court’s clearest writers, while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most complex, according to a linguistic computer analysis by Ryan Owens of Harvard and Justin Wedeking of the University of Kentucky.
• A study that tried to identify the amount of ghostwriting in Supreme Court opinions found the least variation in writing styles of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Scalia and Breyer. Less variation may indicate a justice is doing more of his or her own writing. The study was done by University of Toronto professors Jeffrey Rosenthal and Albert Yoon.
