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

  • Jeffrey Budziak, Daniel Lempert
  • Journal:
    Journal of Law and Courts / Volume 11 / Issue 1 / April 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 April 2023, pp. 45-66
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  • 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.